She turned her attention to the flicker, but it was gone. She waited, but it didn’t return. But then something odd happened. She had gone looking on the dark web for more bits of the weaponized code, had widened her search, expanding into bands of the dark web she had heretofore not explored. A flicker like the shortest bolt of lightning ran down the edge of her screen. Was that the flicker she had seen just before? Her fingers flew over the keys. This time, inside the dark web, the flicker had left a trace of itself. She followed it back, further and further, deeper and deeper, drawing closer and closer to its origin. Which was how, when it appeared again, she was able to catch it—like trapping lightning in the bottle of her laptop.
It was a bit of code, but totally unrelated to the one she was working to decipher. At first, it appeared to be a dangling bit of code, but a few minutes of concentrated effort on her part revealed that it was only disguised as such. It was, in fact, a message—or part of one, the fourth part, if she was right and the three previous flickers were from the same source.
After so much time frustrated at not getting anywhere with the Bourne Initiative, she had begun to doubt her abilities. But her furious and brilliant work now in punching through the exceedingly clever electronic disguise renewed her faith in the abilities Mac called extraordinary.
She set about decoding the cipher. The first thing she discovered was that it had an authenticating marker. That meant the message was sent either by a large international conglomerate or a state-sponsored agency. But why had it come here into Larry’s office space? It wasn’t meant for her. In fact, she would never have seen it had she been working as usual; instead, she’d been on a local screen, trying and failing once again to put her malformed pieces of code into a coherent whole. If the message wasn’t for her, then it must be for Larry.
There was a moment, brief though it was, of thinking she should just forget about the whole thing. If it was for Larry, which seemed more and more likely, she had no business reading it. But then that authenticating marker stuck in the corner of her eye, as the flicker had before, and she thought, I won’t read the message; I’ll just take a peek at who sent it. She shrugged. It was most likely from Global Photographics, the organization he freelanced for. But then why had it come in from the dark web; that made no sense.
So she copied the marker, sent it out into the dark web. What came back was this: Unit 309. What the hell was Unit 309? She’d never heard of it. She latched on to the site that had ID’d the marker, which led her to another site, and another, and still another, until she was deeper into the dark web than she’d ever been before—so deep that she began to feel uncomfortable. She’d heard stories of the very bad entities winging their way through this section of cyberspace.
Her line of inquiry at last dumped her onto a site selling all manner of armament—not simply handguns, semiautomatics, and the like. Those were a dime a dozen out here on the cyber frontier. No, this site was delighted to sell you missiles, flame-throwers, guided rocket launchers, tanks, smart bombs—the list went on and on.
And then her screen blacked out for an instant, to be replaced by an overlay that blared in large lettering: PLEASE ENTER YOUR AUTHENTICATION CODE in seven different languages. She didn’t have one, so she backed out. Or at least tried to. Something had hold of her—a worm algorithm that was trying to find out her identity. It was a very fast worm, and if she hadn’t installed firewalls that she had created that went beyond military grade she would have been a dead duck.
As it was, she was having difficulty staying ahead of the worm. As she worked rapidly and methodically she realized that she had encountered this very worm before while she had headed Meme LLC, and her blood ran cold. It was a Russian military worm, which, now that she had ID’d it definitively, she shut down in short order.
It took her less than ten seconds to remove herself from the dark web entirely. She was sweating through her shirt and her scalp itched. Her heart rate was elevated and her hands trembled slightly.
Unit 309 was an organ of the Russian state. Now that she knew that, she knew where to search to ID it. Less than a minute later, she had her answer: Unit 309 was a cyber-infiltration cadre under the command of spetsnaz, a division of the FSB, the state security agency.
Her mind had just registered this terrifying fact when Larry London waltzed through the door with their lunch.
“Guess what,” he said jovially. “I brought you a cheeseburger and fries.” He set the paper parcels on the table. “A nice little bit of home.”
Only his name wasn’t Larry London, he didn’t just freelance for Global Photographics, and he was no undercover operative of the CIA. Of these things Morgana was now sure. Larry London was a Russian spy, and she had been aiding and abetting him.
Pushing her chair back, she excused herself, hurried down the hall to the ladies’ room, where she vomited up the remains of her breakfast, which now seemed as tainted as if it had been a vile combination of a glass of vodka and a bowl of borscht.
—
“I found him near the edge of my property,” Arthur Lee said.
The three guards who had stopped him at the front entrance to Crowcroft were dressed in jeans and checkered shirts. They wore Timberland ankle boots and matching gabardine jackets, which, if Lee didn’t know it already, would have given them away as feds. He thought they were morons. Dangerous morons, to be sure, but morons all the same.
“Where?” one of the NSA guards said, peering suspiciously into the interior of Lee’s vehicle as if they hadn’t all seen him every day for the last three years. The guard was built like a heavyweight boxer.
Lee indicated with his head. “Trunk.”
While the lanky guard checked the underside of his vehicle with a mirror at the end of a three-foot handle, the bald guard drew his service weapon, opened the trunk.
“He’s not tied up,” Baldy said, and Boxer, leaning in Lee’s window, repeated the statement as if, he, Lee, were the moron.
“He’s hurt,” Lee said, keeping it smooth and servile the way they liked it. “Hurt bad.”
—
“There is, in fact, one way you can get me into Crowcroft,” Bourne had said, an hour before. “As your prisoner.”
Arthur Lee had shaken his head. “Absolutely not. I’m not going to abet your suicide.”
“I’m hurt, Arthur. They’ll see that as soon as you point it out to them. They’ll take me to the infirmary. A doctor will look at me.”
“And then they’ll start to interrogate you.”
“Well,” Bourne replied, “I’m sure they’ll want to.”
—
“He was out for a while.” Lee said now. “In his shape he couldn’t hurt a fly.”
“Nevertheless,” Boxer said.
Baldy went through a barely conscious Bourne’s pockets, grunted disgustedly when he didn’t find anything of interest. He whipped a plastic tie from his jacket pocket, manacled Bourne’s wrists in front of him. Then he transferred Bourne to the backseat, slid in beside him, while Mirror Man stepped around the other side and climbed into the shotgun position. Boxer gave the all clear signal and Baldy said, “Okay, drive.” He pointed. “That way.” Just as if Lee were a kid caught with his hand in the cookie jar ten minutes before dinner. But then federal morons like these were known to have the compassion of a weasel.
“Where are we going?” Lee asked in the servile tone honed over decades of practice.
“The infirmary,” Baldy said.
Lee suppressed a laugh; at least his heart was lighter.
—
Bourne did not look like Bourne. He hadn’t needed to use much of what he had in the satchel he had brought; he was already haggard and thinner by five pounds than when he’d stood at the bow of Boris’s boat, contemplating his coming rendezvous with the Angelmaker. But, among many other singular talents, Bourne was a master of disguise. The key was not to overdo it—a dab of makeup here, a prosthetic to change the shape of mouth and jawline, above all a
n altered gait, which was what most observers looked to first. It was a kind of magic, cues that nudged the observer’s keen eye in another direction. It was, when all was said and done, a form of sleight of hand. He hadn’t had enough time to dye his hair, but just enough to give himself a military high-and-tight haircut.
“We have him, yeah.” Baldy was on his mobile. “No ID anywhere on his person. Military type, mebbe ex.” He listened for a moment. “Right… Okay… Got it.”
“We’re almost at the great house,” Bourne heard Lee say.
“Keep going,” Baldy said.
“But the entrance to the infirmary is right—”
“Do as you’re told, asshole,” Baldy ordered. “Left past the big oak up there.”
They drove past the great house, stately on the outside, rotting from within. The oak tree rose up quickly, blotting out the sky, then vanished as Lee turned down a rutted cart track.
“This is the way to the firing range.” A quaver made Lee’s voice seem like he was under water.
“Park over there,” Baldy ordered.
Lee pulled over next to what had once been a horse barn and was now a storage area for his tractors and balers. The sharp odors of grease and oil were suddenly in the air.
“Don’t move,” Baldy said, as he slid off the seat.
Mirror Man grabbed Bourne and hauled him roughly out of the vehicle.
“Against the wall,” Baldy said. “We’ll do it military style.”
“Old school,” Mirror Man said, gripping Bourne tighter. “I like that.”
They both laughed.
High overhead, a trio of crows stared down with cocked heads, claws gripping a branch of a maple. As Bourne was slammed against the barn wall, they took off like rockets, cawing indignantly.
Mirror Man, palm pressed against Bourne’s chest, put his face so close to Bourne’s their noses almost touched. Baldy was directly behind him, his sidearm out, standing at a safe distance.
Mirror Man flicked open a gravity knife, brandished the narrow blade. “We’re gonna have fun with you, fucker, whoever the hell you are.”
25
A sudden burst of rain rattled the windows. Morgana looked up from her lunch. The sky was a dark bruise; the air pressure had plummeted far enough so that even here inside the building she could feel its effects. The room seemed to tilt as the air grew thick, weighing on her like a wool blanket. She felt unmoored, drifting in a limbo from which she could find no clear exit.
“Are you all right?”
London’s voice made her start. She glanced down at the cheeseburger out of which she had taken a single bite in the twenty minutes since they had begun to eat. “I’m fine.” Her stomach rumbled, but the sight of the burger grease made her want to gag. She put the burger down, wiped her hands on the wad of paper napkins that came with it.
“I want to get back to work.”
“But you’ve scarcely eaten a thing,” London pointed out.
“Morning sickness,” she said, crossing to her laptop and sitting down in front of it.
London frowned. “You’re joking, right?”
“What d’you think?”
“I think you got up on the wrong side of the web today.” He came and sat down beside her. “That was a joke.” When she didn’t respond, he swiveled his chair to face her. “Hey, hey, what’s up?”
“Hey, hey, what’s up?” Would a Russian say that? she asked herself. And then she realized that if she suddenly started behaving so coldly with him he’d surely get suspicious. She put on her sad face, not so very difficult to do. She sighed. “The truth is, I’m missing D.C.” She fluttered one hand. “I mean, I’m stuck here in the middle of nowhere, pretty much going back and forth between the hotel and this dump—no offense. And the only people I see are you and Françoise.”
“I understand completely,” London said.
What would it sound like if he said that in Russian? she wondered.
“But you’ve been sequestered, Morgana, for your own good. Things are still unsettled in Washington.”
“From what I see on the TV things are unsettled all over—Washington, Moscow, NATO HQ. It sounds to me like the world’s going to hell in an out-of-control handcart.”
“Which is why Françoise has you here, safe and sound, where you can work undisturbed by outside forces.”
Like Unit 309, the FSB, or spetsnaz, she thought sourly. But she put a reluctant smile on her face. “Truthfully, Larry, I need a break. I’ve been at this day and night for days and days.”
“No one knows this better than Françoise,” London said. “But, Morgana, we’re under a severe time constraint here. You have to solve the mystery of what the Bourne Initiative is and how it’s going to be deployed.” He gestured with his greasy fingertips. “We’re almost out of time, and, honestly, we’re in your hands.”
“Of course.” She nodded, the good little soldier. “Forget what I said.”
“That’s the girl.” He smiled broadly. “There’ll be plenty of time afterward, I promise you.”
She returned to her work—her work. She could feel him next to her, smell his woodsy aftershave. Did it remind him of his dacha outside Moscow? The fir trees and the snow? She shivered inwardly at these thoughts. What was his real name? Now she knew the truth, “Larry London” was such a ridiculous alias.
He and Françoise read her daily reports; they were always the same. No matter how many bits of the Bourne Initiative she unearthed, none of them fit together. That might be because each new piece was in some small or obscure way different than the last, almost as if the thing was a living organism that kept evolving. And yet the one thing each bit had in common was the zero-day trigger that was now six days away.
What she didn’t put in the reports was her growing conviction that the cyber weapon was being assembled by people far smarter than she was. So many hours at this and she was still at square one when it came to defining the category of cyber weapon it might be. Was it an über-worm built to penetrate the firewalls that guarded the nuclear missile codes available only to the president, as Mac believed? Or was it a virus that self-replicated, creating a zombie army of botnets; was it a key logger that clandestinely transmitted a user’s keystrokes to a third party? The code was nothing like Stuxnet, nothing like Flame or Wiper. Nor was it in any way akin to BlackEnergy, the latest and greatest weaponized malware program. So, then what the hell was it? Maybe Mac knew, maybe he didn’t. In any event, he had now been taken off the board. No one could get to him.
On the other hand, at this moment, Morgana was less interested in reliving her daily frustration with the Bourne Initiative than she was in deciphering the section of coded message she had captured on her laptop before Larry had returned with lunch. While he noshed on her fries as he worked, she was simultaneously running three different programs she herself had created in order to break the cipher and analyze the results.
It was an unsettling project to be working on with London sitting right beside her. Neither could see the other’s screen, but still she felt goose bumps come out on her skin as she worked or, rather, watched her programs do their thing.
The encryption Unit 309 used was masterly, but it wasn’t up to defending against her programs. Eight minutes after she had sicced them on the enciphered message, she was able to read the words en clair, and a full-body panic knifed through her:
PKT4: out of time. She is now in your hands. Use her, then dispose of her. Kay
—
Bourne kneed Mirror Man hard in the groin. As all the wind rushed out of him, Bourne whipped him around, found the knife blade, used it to slice through the plastic manacle. Mirror Man, recovering, jabbed Bourne in the ribs with his elbow. He saw what Baldy was up to, jerked himself free, putting Bourne in the line of fire as Baldy aimed. Bourne chopped down on the side of Mirror Man’s neck, hauled him back in line, jammed his body against his as the bullets meant for him struck Mirror Man instead.
Grabbing the gravity kni
fe as Mirror Man’s knees gave way, Bourne flicked his wrist, and the knife shimmered through the air, sunlight winking off its steel. The blade buried itself in Baldy’s chest. He staggered, knees buckling, then, recovering, launched himself at Bourne.
He fired once as he came, missed. Then he was too close for a firearm, reversed it, seeking to use the butt as a club. Bourne blocked it with the edge of his hand, then grasped Baldy’s arm, pivoted back on his right leg, drawing Baldy in and down. With the back of his neck exposed, Bourne smashed his elbow into the first cervical vertebra. It was the smallest and, therefore, the easiest to fracture. It was also the closest to the skull, its disintegration catastrophic. And so it was with Baldy. He went down and stayed down.
Turning, Bourne saw Arthur Lee, staring at him, slack-jawed, from behind the wheel of his vehicle.
“Get out of here, Arthur,” Bourne said, lifting a hand in a loose salute. “Stay away from the great house and everything will be fine.”
He heard the engine start up, and Lee’s vehicle rumbled away toward his small house near the western edge of the estate. Bourne stripped off his clothes, replaced them with Baldy’s, zipping up the jacket to cover the bloodstain on the shirt. He found the electronic ID key card in the back pocket of Baldy’s pants. Looking around, he saw only the crows, who had returned to their perch, regarding him with their glassy black eyes as he loped back up the track toward the great house.
—
There was a meeting in progress. Bourne could hear multiple voices bleeding out of the half-open door to the library. Someone was being teleconferenced in from D.C.—DoD or the Pentagon. Bourne could see at a glance that the layout of the first floor hadn’t changed since he had last stolen inside.
Once, he had to duck away so as not to be seen by someone passing down the hallway. Reaching the locked door to the back stairs, he fitted Baldy’s key card into the reader at the side of the door, pulled it open, and proceeded cautiously down the stone steps.