All Nicholas could think of was how many lives could have been saved if the CIA had only told them about their undercover agent. He wasn’t surprised, this sort of interagency secrecy was one of the reasons he’d left MI6.
“Mike, please call Zachery and verify this. I’m calling Savich.”
45
KING TO G1
Before Nicholas had a chance to call Savich, his cell phone blasted out one of Sousa’s marches. Nigel, he thought, and when had he programmed that bouncy hit in?
No, not Nigel. Adam Pearce. At last.
He nodded at Mike and stepped away.
“Adam, what do you have for me?”
“Enough news I hope you’ve got a computer in front of you to type it all.”
“I’m in a basement garage in Chelsea with FBI agents and a moronic CIA undercover, so please keep it simple. I’ll call back for the rest.”
“Understood. You know that body you’re running DNA on? The one burned in the fire in Brooklyn? Did you hear who it matches?”
“I have not. And I must ask, how do you know before I’ve been notified?”
“You asked me to do all I could to find a way into COE. Since I work for you, it’s not like I hacked into any databases, not technically. And I do have a way in, if you’re interested.”
Nicholas said, “Adam. Let me say I’m very glad you’re working for the FBI and not against them. And you’re entirely correct: technically, you can do what’s needed to help solve this case. Tell me, who is the dead guy?”
“Ian McGuire. He’s an IRA bomber—well, he was until he got shot, then burned. He was the head of the Londonderry branch. We’re talking a guy who has a sheet the length of my arm.”
“Do you know when he came to the U.S.?”
“Good news and bad news. McGuire’s been here for several months, with his whole crew of fanatic nutcases, maybe eight of them, all long-timers. They came through different airports on different days, under known aliases.”
“How did we miss this? They’re on the watch list, aren’t they?”
“A lot of people are on the watch list, Nicholas. I believe I was on it for a while myself. It doesn’t take any great brainpower; people cross the borders all the time.”
“I trust you know where they’ve been, what they’ve been doing?”
“As much as I can reconstruct. I don’t know where his team is, but I think it’s safe to assume they allied themselves with COE. Speaking of which, let me skip ahead. I found the communications between COE and Gunther Ansell, the whiz in Germany. They paid old Gunther ten million for his proxy servers, then manipulated the code to insert the worm into the oil companies. All it took was a single click on an e-mail and the whole network got infected. Easy.”
“And then someone killed Gunther. So where are they, Adam?”
Adam sighed. “That’s the bad news, Nicholas. Until twelve hours ago, they were in Brooklyn. But now? I don’t know. They’re offline. There hasn’t been a peep on any of their IPs, not since the cyber-attack began. I’ve been sending feelers everywhere I know, but so are half the hackers in the U.S., looking to party along. COE went dark after the attack, and there’s nothing else I can do until they come back online, so I can’t get in if they’re not answering the door.
“But I do have something you’ll like. I found an e-mail generated out of one of their known IP addresses to a guy at a brokerage firm on Wall Street by the name of Porter Wallace. Wallace runs a couple of major hedge funds and is young, really young, to have so much power. He’s even been written up in The Wall Street Journal a few times. I can’t get into his system without an epic hack, and I’m juggling five searches as it is. I’ve sent you all the information I’ve found. You have a lot of manpower there. If your onsite team can start taking apart the data—”
“I will set them to it immediately.”
“Good, because there’s a possibility we can find a trace from earlier to tell us where they were headed next. Right now I can find no rhyme or reason to their targets.”
“What about the targets themselves? There must be a reason COE attacked the places they did. It takes too much time and effort and coordination to set the bombs, like getting plant plans to know where to set the bombs, like at Bayway, with this guy Larry Reeves. There has to be a tie-in. Find it for me, Adam.”
“I’m working as fast as I can. I’ll keep you updated.” And he was gone.
46
PAWN TAKES B6