The Paris Option c-3 Page 9

  "Salaam alake koom." Mauritania's eyes remained closed as he spoke in Arabic while continuing to weave back and forth. "Forgive me, Abu Auda, it's my only vice. The classical Indian raga was part of a rich culture long before the Europeans developed what they claim to be classical music. I enjoy that fact nearly as much as the raga itself. Do you think Allah will forgive me for such indulgence and hubris?"

  "Better him than me. All it is to me is distracting noise." Large and powerful-looking, Abu Auda snorted contemptuously. He was still in the same white robes and gold-trimmed kaffiyeh he had worn in the taxi when Captain Bonnard turned over to him the research notes of the dead lab assistant. Now, alas, the robes were not only dirty from too many days in the grime of Paris, but wet from the rainstorm. None of his women was in Paris to take care of him, which was irritating but could not be helped. He pushed back his kaffiyeh to reveal his long black face, strong, bony chin, small, straight nose, and full mouth set in stone. "Do you wish my report, or are you going to continue to waste my time?"

  Mauritania chuckled and opened his eyes. "Your report, by all means. Allah may forgive me, but you won't, yes?"

  "Allah has more time than we," Abu Auda responded, his expression humorless.

  "So he does, Abu Auda. So he does. Then we'll have this oh-so-vital report of yours, shall we not?" Mauritania's eyes were amused, but beneath the surface was a glint that turned his visitor from complaints to the business at hand.

  Abu Auda told him, "My watcher at the Pasteur Institute reports your person, Smith, appeared there. Smith spoke to Dr. Michael Kerns, apparently an old comrade. My man was able to hear only part of the conversation, when they were speaking of Zellerbach. After that, Smith left the Pasteur, drank a small beer at a caf, and then took the metro, where our miserable incompetent lost him."

  Mauritania interrupted, "Did he lose Smith, or did Smith lose him?"

  Abu Auda shrugged. "I wasn't there. He did report a curious fact. Smith appeared to wander aimlessly until he reached a bookshop, where he watched for a time, smiled at something, continued on to the metro, and went down into the station."

  "Ah?" Mauritania's blue eyes grew brighter. "As if, perhaps, he noticed he was being watched when he left the Pasteur?"

  The green-brown eyes snapped. "I'd know more if my idiot hadn't lost him at the metro station. He waited too long to follow him down. By Allah, he'll pay!"

  Mauritania scowled. "What then, Abu?"

  "We didn't find Smith again until tonight, when he arrived at the daughter's home. Our man there saw him, but we don't believe Smith knew. Smith was upstairs in her apartment nearly fifteen minutes, and then they rode down in the elevator together. As soon as she stepped outside, four assailants attacked. Ah, the fine quality of their work! Would to God they were ours. They eliminated Smith from the action first inside the door, separating him from the woman, and then they dragged the woman away. By the time Smith recovered and came after them, they had her inside the van, even though she fought them hard. He killed one, but the rest escaped. Smith inspected the dead man, took his pistol, and left before the police arrived. He found a taxi at a nearby hotel. Our man trailed him to the Champs Élysées, where he also lost him."

  Mauritania nodded, almost with satisfaction. "This Smith doesn't want to become involved with the police, is suspicious of being followed, skilled at eluding a tail, is calm under attack, and can use a pistol well. I'd say our Dr. Smith is more than he seems, as we suspected."

  "At the very least, he's got military training. But is Smith our main concern? What of the daughter? What of the five men, for there must've been a driver in the van? Weren't you concerned about the daughter before this happened? Now people we don't know, and who are experienced and well trained, have kidnapped her. It's disturbing. What do they want? Who are they? What danger are they to us?"

  Mauritania smiled. "Allah has answered your wish. They're ours. I'm glad you approve of their skills. Obviously, it was wise of me to hire them."

  Abu Auda frowned. His gaze narrowed. "You didn't tell me."

  "Does the mountain tell the wind everything? You had no need to know."

  "With time, even the mountain can be destroyed by the elements."

  "Calm yourself, Abu Auda. This was no reflection on you. We have a long and honorable history together, and now, at last, we're in a position to show the world the truth of Islam. Who else would I want to share that with? But if you'd known about these men I hired, you would've only wanted to be with them. Not with me. I need you, as you well know."

  Abu Auda's frown disappeared. "I suppose you're right," he said grudgingly.

  "Good. Of course I am. Let's return to the American, Jon Smith. If Captain Bonnard is correct, then Smith belongs to no known secret service. For whom, precisely, does he work?"

  "Could our new allies have sent him? Some plan of their own they haven't bothered to tell us? I don't trust them."

  "You don't trust your dog, your wives, or your grandmother." Mauritania gave a small smile and contemplated his music. He closed his eyes a moment as the raga rhythm subtly altered. "But you're right to be careful. Treachery is always possible, often inevitable. Not only a wily desert Fulani can be devious."

  "There's another thing," Abu Auda went on as if he had not heard. "The man I assigned to watch the Pasteur Institute says he can't be certain, but he thinks there was someone else watching not only Smith but him. A woman. Dark-haired, young, but unattractive and poorly-dressed."

  Mauritania's blue eyes snapped open. "Watching both Smith and our man? He has no idea who she was?"

  "None."

  Mauritania uncoiled and stood up. "It's time to leave Paris."

  Abu Auda was surprised. "I don't like going away without knowing more about Smith and this unknown female who watches us."

  "We expected attention, didn't we? We'll observe and be careful, but we must also move. Relocation is the best defense."

  Abu Auda smiled, displaying a dazzling set of white teeth against his black skin. "You sound like a desert warrior yourself. Perhaps you learn after all these years."

  "A compliment, Abu?" Mauritania laughed. "An honor indeed. Don't worry about Smith. We know enough, and if he's actually searching for us, we'll deal with him on our terms. Report to our friends that Paris has become too crowded, and we're moving early. It may be necessary to adjust our timetable forward. Beginning now."

  The giant warrior nodded as he followed the small terrorist, who glided from the room, his feet seeming barely to touch the carpet, soundless.

  Folsom, California

  The attack began at six p.m. in the headquarters of the California Independent System Operator (Cal-ISO) in the small prison town of Folsom, east of Sacramento. Cal-ISO was an essential component of the state's power system and integral to the movement of electricity throughout California. Although it was May, Californians were already worrying that summer might bring the return of rolling blackouts.

  One of the operators, Tom Milowicz, stared at the dials of the big grid. "Jesus Christ," he breathed.

  "The numbers are spinning south. Into the toilet!"

  "What are you saying?"

  "It's too much, too fast. The grid's going to crash! Get Harry!'

  Arlington, Virginia

  In a secret installation across the Potomac River from the nation's capital, the elite computer specialists of the FBI cyber team quickly determined the catastrophe to be the work of a hacker, country of origin still undetermined. Now they battled to bring the California power grid back online and stop the hacker's progress. But as the team discovered, it was already too late.

  The hacker had written" compiled" software that allowed him or her to shatter the tough firewalls that usually protected the most sensitive parts of the Cal-ISO power system. He had bypassed trip wires, which were intended to alert security personnel to unauthorized entry, had bypassed logs that pinpointed intruders while they were committing an illegal infiltration, and had opened closed ports.


  Then the extraordinarily adept hacker had moved on, invading one power supplier after another, because Cal-ISO's computers were linked to a system that controlled the flow of electricity across the entire state. In turn, the California system was tied into the transmission grid for the whole Western United States. The invader hacked from system to system with phenomenal speed. Unbelievable, to anyone who did not witness it.

  Lights, stoves, air conditioners, heaters, cash registers, computers, ATMs, breathing devices all machines, from luxury to life-giving, as long as they required electricity went dead as power to Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Diego, and Denver suddenly ceased.

  Outside Reno, Nevada

  The battered old Chrysler Imperial of Ricky Hitomi rocked with the shrieks and laughter of his five best friends as it powered down the rural blacktop through the night. They had met at his girlfriend Janis Borotra's house and smoked a few joints in the barn before all piling into Ricky's heap. Now they were heading for more fun at Justin Barley's place. They were high-school seniors and would graduate in a week.

  Occupied with their wild partying, their minds dulled with weed, none saw or heard the fast-moving freight train in the distance. Nor did they notice that the gate at the crossing was still up, the warning lights dark, and the alarm bells silent. When Janis finally heard the screaming train whistle and shrieking brakes, she shouted at Ricky. It was too late. Ricky was already driving onto the rail crossing.

  The freight train blasted into them and carried the car and their battered bodies a mile before it could stop.

  Arlington, Virginia

  Panic spread in the secret FBI cyber installation across the Potomac River from the nation's capital. A decade ago, the nation's telephones, power grids, and emergency 911 number and fire dispatches had been separate systems, individual, unique. They could be hacked, but only with great difficulty, and certainly the hacker could not get from one system to another, except under very unusual circumstances.

  But deregulation had changed all that. Today hundreds of new energy firms existed, as well as online power traders, and everything was linked through the multitude of telephone companies, whose interconnections also had resulted from deregulation. This vast number of electronically joined entities looked a lot like the Internet, which meant the best hackers could use one system as a door to another.

  Defeated by the power and speed of the hacker, the FBI experts watched helplessly as switches flipped and the violent mischief continued. The velocity at which firewalls were breached and codes blown shocked them. But the worst aspect of the nightmare was how quickly the hacker could adjust his access code.

  In fact, it seemed almost as if their counterattack caused his code to evolve. The more they fought him and his computer, the smarter his computer became. They had never seen anything like it. It was impossible horrifying. A machine that could learn and evolve far faster than a human thought.

  Denver, Colorado

  In her penthouse atop the opulent twenty-story Aspen Towers apartment building, Carolyn Helms, founder and CEO of Saddle Leather Cosmetics for Western Men, was entertaining her business associates at an intimate birthday dinner her forty-second. It was a joyous occasion. She had made them a lot of money, and they were a great team, anticipating an even more exciting and lucrative future.

  Just as her longtime close friend and executive vice president George Harvey toasted her for the third time, she gasped, clutched her heart, and collapsed. George fell to his knees to check her vital signs. Her treasurer, Hetty Sykes, called 911. George began CPR.

  The paramedic rescue team of the Denver Fire Department arrived within four minutes. But as they rushed into the building, the lights went off and the elevators froze. The building was in complete darkness. In fact, from what they could tell, the whole city was. They searched for the stairs. As soon as they found them, they began the long run up twenty stories to the penthouse.

  By the time they arrived, Carolyn Helms was dead.

  Arlington, Virginia

  Phones rang in the secret Virginia headquarters of the cyber crime squad.

  Los Angeles: "What in hell happened?"

  Chicago: "Can you fix it? Are we next?"

  Detroit: "Who's behind it? Find out pronto, you hear? You'd better not let this happen in our court!"

  One of the FBI team shouted to the room: "The main attack came through a server in Santa Clara, California. I'm tracking back!"

  Bitterroot Mountains on the Border Between Montana and Idaho

  A Cessna carrying a party of hunters home with their meat and trophies landed neatly between the double row of blue lights that marked the rural strip. The Cessna turned and taxied toward a lighted Quonset hut, where hot coffee and bourbon were waiting. Inside the little plane, the hunters were cracking jokes and recounting the successes of their trip when suddenly the pilot swore.

  "What in hell?"

  Everywhere they could see, all electric lights had disappeared the runway, the little terminal, the Quonset hut, the shops and garages. Suddenly there was a noise, hard to distinguish over the sound of their own plane's engine. Then they saw it: A landing Piper Cub, owned by a bush pilot, had veered off course in the darkness. The Cessna pilot pulled hard on his stick, but the Piper was going so fast there was no escape.

  At impact, the Piper burst into flames and ignited the Cessna. No one survived.

  Arlington, Virginia

  A dozen FBI computer forensics specialists were analyzing the initial attack against Cal-ISO, looking for signs of the hacker. The cyber sleuths scanned their screens as their state-of-the-art software analyzed for footprints and fingerprints the trail of hits and misses all hackers left behind. There were none.

  As they labored, power returned inexplicably, without warning. The FBI team watched their screens with disbelief as the Western states' massive complex of power plants and transmission lines throbbed back to life. Relief spread through the room.

  Then the chief of the cyber team swore at the top of his lungs. "He's breaking into a telecommunications satellite system!"

  Paris, France

  Wednesday, May 7

  A harsh buzzing shattered Smith's instantly forgotten dream. He grabbed his Sig Sauer from under his pillow and sat up, alert, in a pitch-black room filled with alien odors and misplaced shadows. There was a faint spattering of rain outside. Gray light showed around the drapes. Where was he? And then he realized the buzz came from his cell phone, which rested on his bedside table. Of course, he was in his hotel room, not far from the boulevard Saint-Germain.

  "Damnation." He snatched up the phone. Only one person would call at this hour. "I thought you told me to get some sleep," he complained.

  "Covert-One never sleeps, and we operate on D.C. time. It's barely the shank of the evening here," Fred Klein told him airily. As he continued, his tone grew grave: "I've got unfortunate news. It looks as if Diego Garcia wasn't an atmospheric glitch or any other malfunction. We've been hit again."

  Smith forgot his rude awakening. "When?"

  "It's still going on." He told Smith everything that had happened since Cal-ISO went offline. "Six kids are dead in Nevada. A train hit their car because the crossing signal was out. I've got a stack of notices here of civilians who were hurt and killed because of the blackout. There'll be more."

  Smith thought. "Has the FBI traced the attack back?"

  "Couldn't. The hacker's defenses were so swift it seemed as if his computer was learning and evolving."

  Jon's chest tightened. "A molecular computer. Can't be anything else. And they've got someone who can operate it. Check whether any computer hackers are missing. Get the other agencies on it."

  "Already have."

  "What about Chambord and his daughter? Do you have anything for me?"

  "In my hand. His bio, but it doesn't seem useful."

  "Maybe you've missed something. Give me the highlights."

  "Very well. He was born in Paris. His fath
er was a French paratroop officer, killed during the siege at Dien Bien Phu. His mother was Algerian and raised him alone. He showed a genius for math and chemistry early, went through all the best French schools on scholarships, did his doctoral work at Cal Tech, postdoc at Stanford under their leading geneticist, and post-post doc at the Pasteur Institute. After that, he held professional positions in Tokyo, Prague, Morocco, and Cairo, and then returned about ten years ago to the Pasteur. As for his personal life, his mother raised him as a Muslim, but he showed little interest in religion as an adult. Hobbies were sailing, single-malt Scotch whiskies, hiking in the countryside, and gambling, mainly roulette and poker. Not much of Islam in there. That help?"

  Smith paused, thinking. "So Chambord was a risk-taker, but not extreme. He liked his little relaxations, and he didn't mind change. In fact, it sounds as if he could be restless. Certainly he wasn't bogged down by a need for stability or continuity, unlike a lot of scientists. He trusted his own judgment, too, and could make big leaps. Just the characteristics one wants in fine theoretical and research scientists. We already knew he didn't especially follow rules and procedures. It all fits. So what about the daughter? Is she the same type?"

  "An only child, close to her father, especially since her mother's death. Science scholarships exactly like her father, but not with his early brilliance. When she was about twenty, she was bitten by the acting bug. She studied in Paris, London, and New York, and then worked in provincial French towns until she finally made a splash in live theater in Paris. I'd say her personality's a lot like Chambord himself. Unmarried, apparently never even been engaged. She's been quoted as saying, 'I'm too single-minded about my work to settle down with anyone outside the business, and actors are wrapped up in themselves and unstable, just as I probably am.' That's Chambord all over again modest, realistic. She's had plenty of admirers and boyfriends. You know the drill."

  Smith smiled in the dark room at Klein's primness. It was one of the odd quirks about the lifelong clandestine operative. Klein had seen or done just about everything anyone could, was nonjudgmental, but drew the line at discussing anything remotely graphic about people's sexual behavior, despite being quite ready to send a Juliet agent to seduce a target, if that's what had to be done to get what was needed.