The Nostradamus File

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

The sat phone connection was good. "Everyone is all right?" Harker asked.

"Yes."

"No trouble about the guns?"

"No. The Jordanian cops are treating it as a terrorist attack on Western tourists. They never searched us. Selena distracted them. They even gave us a ride back to the hotel."

He shifted in the chair. His back was locked up tight.

"I'd like to get my hands on that guide. The bad guys just upped the ante."

"What's your plan now?" The connection sounded clear but far away.

"Selena is in the other room on the computer looking for something that ties into that inscription we found. We need to know where to go next. The inscription is the only lead we've got. If there's something there, she'll figure it out."

"I've been looking at Cask and Swords," Harker said. "Getting a membership list was next to impossible. People in this group are a who's who of American power. If they're behind this, we have a problem."

"We always have a problem."

"What I don't know is who is part of the core group Adam warned you about. There are a lot of people who would profit if there was another war. I'm working on narrowing down the list."

She paused. Nick heard her pen tapping in the background.

"There are several members who advise President Rice."

"You think Rice is involved?"

"No, I don't. He's not a member and everything he's done points the other way. But some of the people around him are. The Secretary of the Treasury, for example."

"Are you going to tell Rice about this?"

"Not until we have something concrete. I can't go to the President on the basis of what Adam told you. We don't even know who Adam is."

"You have a lot of credibility with Rice."

"Not that much. Follow up on what Selena finds out. Keep me up to date."

In Virginia, Elizabeth put down the phone. She looked through the bullet proof windows at the flowers growing over the underground rooms. The day was clear, sunny. She could have been in an average home almost anywhere in America. Project headquarters was anything but your average American home.

She looked at the list she'd compiled of Cask and Swords members. Who were the conspirators? She had no reason to doubt what Adam had told Nick. He'd been right in the past. His intel had prevented millions of deaths and probable war.

Elizabeth glanced at the picture of her father on the desk. She remembered a conversation with him from when she was fifteen. She'd had a complicated school science project due by the end of the week and hadn't been sure what would make it work. Her father had been in his usual chair, the big green one near the fireplace. It was a warm spring on the Western slope of the Rockies. The fire wasn't lit. The bourbon in his glass was warmth enough.

"I don't know where to start," she'd said.

"Have you made a list?"

"Yes, but there are too many things on it."

"What are the criteria?"

"Well, it's about the rate of gaseous diffusion in…"

"That's not what I asked. It doesn't matter what it's about. What matters is the critical thinking you apply to the problem. Whenever there's too much information you have to narrow things down. Sort out what's important and what isn't."

"How do I do that?"

"You have to ask yourself the right questions."

What were the right questions? She looked at the list. What would someone gain from starting a war? People who wanted to control things were usually driven by love, power and money. Elizabeth didn't think love factored in here, though some seemed to love war.

Power and money. The list had plenty of people on it who had both. She decided to pick out the top ten. Who had the most wealth, the most toys? In a hierarchy of Alpha males, that person would have serious clout. Who would benefit the most from war? She could find out. Almost everything that mattered was in the computers somewhere.

It was a scary thing to contemplate, the power of electronic surveillance at her fingertips. The government's fingertips. With that kind of power, it should be no problem to learn everything necessary about the members of Cask and Swords. She began searching, using a program Stephanie had written that made Google and the other search engines look like something out of the Stone Age.

It didn't take long for a pattern to emerge. It should have been easy to find what she wanted, but it wasn't turning out that way. She kept running into conflicting data and broken links. She entered a new search focused on a prominent Cask and Swords member.

Several hundred miles north of Virginia, a string of characters appeared on a monitor screen with the location of the Project computer. The server was programmed to respond with code designed to worm its way into the computer of any curious person looking for a particular kind of information.

In Virginia, Stephanie hurried into Harker's office.

"Director, shut your computer down."

Elizabeth turned it off. "What is it, Steph?"

"Someone just tried to break through our firewall while you were on the system," she said. "I blocked it and sent a trace back. What were you looking at?"

"One of the Cask and Swords members. He hosts an annual retreat for them at his summer home in Maine."

"You were using the program I wrote? Not Google?"

"Yes. I wanted a deeper layer."

"Whoever he is, someone with serious computer savvy is working for him. My program triggered an auto response that tried to send a virus back to you. I quarantined it."

"It's not a standard security response?"

"No way. My program is transparent. I designed it to get through the firewalls at the Pentagon. A normal security program wouldn't respond to it."

"Will they know it was us looking?"

"Yes. To send something back they had to isolate our location, which is almost impossible. I'd like to meet whoever wrote the program."

There was grudging admiration in her voice. Stephanie was a legend in the small world of extreme hackers, where she was known only by her screen name, Wonder Woman. She'd worked for NSA before Elizabeth recruited her.

"This man heads up the richest private investment bank in America," Elizabeth said. "Maybe that explains the security."

"Maybe."

On the list of Cask and Swords members, Elizabeth put an asterisk by the name of Phillip Harrison III.