“No need. It’s just a vehicle. He bought it from an obscure little company in Delhi that is now out of business. When he has a new sermon to transmit worldwide, he sends it on Hejira, but he keeps the exact geolocation secret by causing it to emanate from origin after origin, whizzing round and round the world, bouncing it off a hundred other computers whose owners are certainly completely ignorant of the role they are playing. Eventually, the sermon could have come from anywhere.”
“How does he prevent tracing back down the line of diversions?”
“By creating a proxy server to create a false Internet protocol. The IP is like your home address with zip code. Then into the proxy server he has introduced a malware or botnet to bounce his sermon all over the world.”
“Translate.”
The man from the NSA sighed. He spent his entire life talking cyberjargon with colleagues who knew exactly what he was talking about.
“Malware. ‘Mal,’ as in bad or evil. A virus. ‘Bot,’ short for robot, something that does your bidding without asking questions or revealing who it is working for.”
The Tracker thought it over.
“So the mighty NSA is really defeated?”
The government’s computer ace was not flattered, but he nodded.
“We will, of course, keep trying.”
“There’s a clock ticking. I may have to try some place else.”
“Be my guest.”
“Let me ask this. Control your natural chagrin. Just supposing you were the Preacher. Who would you absolutely not want on your tail? Who would worry the crap out of you?”
“Someone better than me.”
“Is there any such someone?”
The NSA man sighed.
“Probably. Somewhere out there. I would guess from the new generation. Sooner or later, the veterans are overtaken by some beardless kid in every walk of life.”
“Do you know any beardless kids? Any specific beardless kid?”
“Look, I’ve never even met him. But I heard at a recent seminar and trade fair of a youngster right here in Virginia. My informant said he was not at the trade fair because he lives with his parents and never leaves their home. Never, not ever. He’s peculiar. In this world he’s a bundle of nerves, hardly talks. But he flies like a fighter ace when he enters his own world.”
“Which is?”
“Cyberspace.”
“You have a name? Even an address?”
“I figured you might ask.” He took a slip of paper from a pocket and passed it over. Then he rose. “Don’t blame me if he’s no use. It was only a rumor, in-trade gossip among us weirdos.”
When he had gone, the Tracker settled for the muffins and coffee and left. In the parking lot he glanced at the paper. Roger Kendrick. And an address in Centerville, Virginia, one of myriad small satellite towns that had sprung up in the past two decades and then exploded with commuters since 9/11.
• • •
All trackers, all detectives, whatever and wherever the hunt, whoever the quarry, need one break. Just one. Kit Carson was going to be lucky. He was going to get two.
One would come from a strange teenage boy too frightened to leave the attic bedroom of his parents’ backstreet house in Centerville, and the other from an old Afghan peasant whose rheumatism was forcing him to lay down his rifle and come in from the mountains.
3
About the only unconventional or audacious thing Lt. Col. Musharraf Ali Shah of the Pakistan regular army had ever done was marry. It was not the fact of marriage but the girl he wed.
In 1979, at the age of twenty-five and single, he had been briefly posted to the Siachen Glacier, a bleak and wild zone in the far north of his country where the border abutted Pakistan’s mortal enemy, India. Later, from 1984 to 1999, there would be a low-level but festering border war in the Siachen, but back then it was just cold and bleak, a hardship posting.