The Jungle

21

CABRILLO AND LINCOLN CAUGHT UP WITH THE OREGON AT Port Said after the ship had made a transit of the Suez Canal. As much as they wanted to get Gunawan Bahar and his henchman, Smith, they had another operation in the luxury resort city of Monte Carlo. One of the emirs of the United Arab Emirates wanted the Corporation as extra security whenever he traveled. It mattered not that he didn’t really have an enemy in the world. He felt better knowing that Cabrillo and his people were looking out for him while he basked off the coast on his hundred-foot yacht or gambled insane amounts of money in the casino. He got the idea from the Kuwaiti emir, who had used the Corporation in South Africa a few months back. Although they’d arrived late because Juan had been marooned in Antarctica and they’d had to return to pick him up, the team foiled an assassination plot involving some al-Qaeda operatives from Somalia.

No sooner had a chartered helicopter landed the duo on the Oregon’s deck and beat south for the Egyptian port city than her engines ramped up, and soon a miles-long wake marked her swift passage. After dumping his single bag in his cabin, Juan made straight for the Op Center, where Linda Ross had the conn.

“Welcome back,” she beamed. “We’re all relieved that MacD got his daughter.”

Hali Kasim was at his customary seat at the communications workstation. “Just so you know, I’ve been monitoring local media in New Orleans. They’re calling it drug-related arson. No suspects and no IDs on the bodies.”

“There wasn’t much left to ID,” Cabrillo remarked. “How’s our passenger making out?”

For the weeks she’d been aboard the Oregon as a virtual prisoner, though in a velvet-lined cell, Soleil Croissard hadn’t done much but stay in her cabin or watch the sea from the upper flying bridge. She even took her meals in her room. She was mourning her father and working to come to grips with her own abduction. Doctor Huxley, the ship’s de facto psychiatrist, had tried talking with her on several occasions but hadn’t made significant progress.

“Would you believe she snapped out of it?” Linda informed him.

“Really?” Juan was surprised because she’d given no indication when he’d said good-bye just a couple days ago.

“You’re not going to believe what did it either. Eric and Murph, who are panting after her worse than the girl we rescued from that sinking cruise ship—”

“Jannike Dahl,” Juan recalled. “She was the sole survivor of the Golden Dawn.”

“That’s her. Anyway, those two got the bright idea of rigging one of the parafoils we use for combat drops off a winch at the fantail so they could parasail off the ship. To their credit, it worked like a charm, and most of us have had a go at it. But Soleil is the one who can’t get enough. I talked to Hux about it, and she reminded me that Soleil’s an adrenaline junkie. She needed a jolt to remind her she’s still alive.”

Linda hit some keystrokes on the computer built into the arm of the command chair, and an aft-facing camera mounted high on the superstructure came up on a portion of the main view screen. Sure enough, there were Murph and Stoney with Soleil Croissard. She already sported a black parachute harness, and the two men were clipping her to a thin line leading off to a winch. As they watched, Soleil climbed up the transom rail with the drogue chute in her hand. She faced forward, said something to Eric and Mark with a big grin on her face, and tossed the little parachute into the Oregon’s slipstream. The main chute was yanked from the harness in a billow of ebony nylon and inflated, heaving her off her perch in a gut-wrenching ascent.

Toggling the controls, Linda tilted the camera up until they could see Soleil silhouetted against the azure sky. She must have been two hundred feet above the deck, and because of the ship’s speed she would keep going higher and higher if not for the tether.

Cabrillo wasn’t too sure he liked this. A few years back they got it into their heads that they could wake-surf, while the ship was at speed, using a line rigged from an extension pole out of the starboard boat garage. It worked fine for about ten minutes before Murph took a spill and lost his grip on the T-bar. They’d been forced to stop the ship in order to launch a Zodiac to haul his butt out of the drink.

Mark had suggested outfitting some sort of catch net aft of the garage for their next attempt. Juan nixed the whole enterprise.

But if this is what it took to draw Soleil out of her shell, then he supposed no harm was done. “I guess,” he said after watching her for a moment, “that if the UAV ever fails us, we can put a lookout up in that contraption.”

“You should try it,” Linda encouraged. “It’s a blast.”

“And while they’ve been out playing, how’s the research coming?”

“Nada,” Linda replied. “Bahar’s still off the radar, and we can’t find anything that remotely ties him to any criminal or terrorist activities. Oh, wait. One thing. The oil platform. It was part of something called the Oracle Project. Murph found that in a purged accounting file in Bahar’s corporate computer, though now he can’t access it anymore. It’s got a new firewall that he can’t break through.”

“I find that hard to believe.”

“So does he. I do have some good news. Langston phoned earlier. Says he has a job for us.”

Juan was shocked and elated. They’d been left out to dry for so long, he didn’t think the CIA would ever use their services again. “What’s the mission?”

“The Chinese have built a new surveillance ship, state-of-the-art. She’s currently off the coast of Alaska. He wants us to persuade them to go home. He said you’d figure out something creative that won’t start an international incident. I told him we needed a week.”

Cabrillo’s gears were already churning when he happened to glance at the video screen again. Soleil was no longer in camera range. He reached across to adjust the camera and saw that she was being reeled back down to the deck. Mark and Eric watched anxiously, making Cabrillo wonder if anything was wrong. When she was back firmly on the Oregon, she yanked one of the chute’s toggles, spilling air from that side and collapsing the canopy. Eric helped her bundle it into a ball while the wind fought to refill it. Mark Murphy was running for the superstructure.

Juan reset the main board to show the ship’s bows cleaving the Mediterranean. When ten minutes went by and Murph hadn’t found him in the Op Center, the Chairman called him in his room.

“Everything all right?”

“I’m a little busy, Juan,” Mark said, and killed the connection.

Rather than wait for the eccentric genius, Cabrillo went down to the forward hold, a vast open space they used for storage when they were running legitimate cargoes as part of their cover or, when it was empty like now, for repacking chutes. He found Soleil alone. When he asked about Eric, she told him he followed Mark almost as soon as he could.

“Looked like quite the joyride,” he said.

“Not quite the rush I got jumping off the Eiffel Tower, but it was fun.” She had the parachute laid flat on the wooden deck and was tracing the riser lines. It was clear she knew exactly what she was doing.

“How many jumps have you made?”

“BASE or from an airplane? I’ve made dozens of the first and hundreds of the second.”

He saw the haunted look that had dimmed her eyes and sallowed her complexion was almost gone. There were still traces of it when she tried to smile, as if she felt she didn’t deserve a moment’s happiness. Cabrillo remembered those same feelings after his wife was killed. He thought he was dishonoring her memory by laughing at a joke or enjoying a movie. It was nothing more than a way of punishing himself for something that wasn’t his fault, and in time it faded.

“Ever jump the New River Gorge Bridge?” It was an 876-foot span in West Virginia and considered one of the best spots for jumping in the world.

“Of course,” she replied as if he’d asked if she breathed. “You?”

“Back when I was in training for an organization I once worked for, a bunch of us went over and did it.”

“Linda tells me you were in the CIA.” Juan nodded. “Was it exciting?”

“Most days, it’s as boring as any office job. Others, you’re so scared that no matter what you do you can’t dry your palms.”

“I think that is real danger,” she said. “What I do, it’s only pretend.”

“I don’t know. Getting shot by a border guard or having your chute fail at eleven thousand feet has pretty much the same results.”

Her eyes lit up a little. “Ah, but I have a reserve parachute.”

“You know what I mean.”

Her smile said that she did. “I guess what I am saying is that I place myself at risk for my own needs. You do it for others. I am very selfish, while you are generous.”

Juan broke eye contact and thrust his hands in his pockets. “Listen, ah,” he stammered for just a second and changed subjects. “I hate to bring this up, but we could use your help. I’m convinced that your father was targeted for a specific reason. There is something he has that Bahar wanted.”

He used the present tense when mentioning her father, though he knew in all likelihood Croissard was dead.

“We’ve snooped through his electronic files for everything he’s been working on for the past year,” he continued. “So far, nothing jumps out at us. I was wondering if you would take a look and see if anything grabs your attention.”

She caught his eye again, her beautiful face somber. “He is dead, isn’t he?”

“I can’t confirm it, but I believe so. I am sorry.”

“My helping you will punish those men?”

“That’s the plan.”

Soleil nodded slowly. “I will try, but I think I mentioned that we weren’t close and I know hardly anything about his business dealings.”

“Just do the best you can. That’s all I ask of anyone.”

CABRILLO WAS IN HIS CABIN later that night when there was a knock on the door.

“It’s me and Eric,” Mark Murphy said.

“Come on in.”

The two entered the cabin with the eagerness of puppies.

“We figured it out when Soleil was parasailing, and I think we confirmed it,” Mark said excitedly. “The computers on the oil rig were the alpha test for why Bahar needed those crystals.”

“The beta machine uses optical lasers,” Eric put in before Mark could.

“Alpha? Beta?” Juan asked. “What are you two talking about?”

“Bahar built a massive parallel processor, perhaps one of the top-five most powerful computer systems in the world, and then casually threw it away, right?” Murph said.

“Yeah,” Juan agreed cautiously.

“Why?”

“Why build it or why throw it away?”

“Two questions, one answer. It was built to design its replacement. When he succeeded, Bahar chucked the old one. It was the firewall that went up two days ago that tipped me off. There’s no commercially available privacy program that we can’t hack. We tried every trick we knew and got nothing. This is something we’ve never seen before, and it isn’t software.”

“A new computer?” Cabrillo asked.

“A new type of computer,” Murph countered.

“A quantum computer,” Eric added.

Juan said, “Refresh me on quantum computers.”

“It’s a machine that thinks in ones and zeros, like a regular computer, but also uses the quantum effects of superposition and entanglement so that it can read data as both one and zero or neither of them at the same time. Since it has more options to represent information and to process it, it is fast. Blindingly fast.”

Mark said, “Because he was after those crystals, we think Bahar’s machine is also an optical computer, which means that there is no electronic resistance for the messaging system. It is one hundred percent efficient and probably a billion times more powerful than any computer on the planet.”

“I thought these things were still years away.”

“Ten years ago they were fifty years away,” Mark stated matter-of-factly. “Eight years ago they were thirty. Five years ago they were twenty. Today the best minds in the field say ten. But I think Bahar did it sooner.”

“What can he do with a quantum computer?” Cabrillo asked.

“There isn’t a network in the world he couldn’t get into and ultimately control. Bank records and stock transfers become open books. The best NSA encryption would be broken a few picoseconds after an initial attack. Secret military communications could be read in plaintext instantly. A Q-puter can analyze every piece of data hitting the net at the same time it arrives. Nothing’s off-limits. Every e-mail, every broadcast. Hell, everything.”

Eric’s next words chilled the room. “This capability gives Bahar unlimited power, and there’s not a damned thing anyone can do about it.”

“How sure are you about this?” Cabrillo asked, his mind racing.

“Positive, boss man. We had good access to Bahar’s business files and now we don’t. They’re still archived, we can tell that. We just can’t get at them. Something dramatic changed two days ago, and the only thing that makes sense is that he developed a computer so advanced as to make the superserver farm on the J-61 platform obsolete: a quantum.”

“We need to tell Langston Overholt about this. The CIA has no idea what’s coming their way.”

“Bad idea,” both young men said simultaneously.

“Why?”

“For whatever reason, Bahar considers us a danger to him,” Mark replied. “If we contact anyone about this, he’s going to hear about it. Any transmission we make, no matter how encrypted, will be listened to. We shouldn’t tip our hand that we know what he’s done.”

“Besides, a quantum computer would ace the Touring Test,” Eric said.

“I’ve heard of that,” Juan said. “It’s something about a computer being able to mimic a human being.”

“Give the man a cigar. He does listen to our technobabble on occasion. The test is designed to see if the machine can fool someone into thinking they’re interacting with a real person. Mark and I discussed the possibility that a quantum computer could actually mimic an individual, not just a generic person. We think it can.”

Cabrillo thought he understood what they were getting at, and it was a scary prospect. “You’re saying I could be on the phone with Overholt when in fact I’m talking to the computer?”

“And the only way you’d be able to tell is if you asked it something only you and Mr. Overholt know. Anything on the public record, however, the machine would have already digested and be able to spit back at you.”

“Could this thing imitate the president?”

“Probably, but, don’t worry, it can’t launch nuclear missiles. That entails face-to-face confirmation.”

“Any speculation as to what he will use it for?”

“We talked about it. This isn’t about money, though he could empty every bank account in about two seconds. This is political. He could have destroyed our computer infrastructure the moment the machine went live, so he’s after something else. We think it’s about making our government bend to his will.”

“Agreed. Recommendations?”

“Try to find where the computer is and blow it to pieces. And, no, we have no idea where it’s located. It could be anywhere.”

Cabrillo rubbed a hand across his jaw, feeling the rasp of day-old beard. “I guess it comes down to Soleil. Bahar went after her father for a reason, so there’s got to be something in his background that we haven’t seen or realized the significance of. Let’s all pray she can figure it out.”

“And if she can’t?”

“Then the world as we know it is about to become a very different place.”