Once Dead Page 4

  “So where was the body?”

  “We figured the Ghurkari gang took it. Probably played a grand football game with his head.”

  Returning to his seat, Nolan pursed his lips. “Then why are Gregory’s fingerprints all over Diebert’s documents?”

  Getting no response, Nolan asked another question. “Why did Roskov send this to us?”

  Craig Faragut answered. “I think he wants us to know he’s about to clean up our mess.”

  Nolan nodded. That normally would have worked for him. But not now. Not with Rolf Koenig about to bring all these years of preparation to fruition in Kazakhstan. Right now he just couldn’t afford to have Roskov distracted by Jack Gregory.

  He turned to look at the only person who hadn’t yet spoken.

  “Whether Roskov wants our help or not isn’t important. Make the problem go away. Any means available.”

  Jacob Knox’s lips shifted into what might have been a smile.

  “I’m on it.”

  CHAPTER 8

  Because Jack craved action, he refused to yield to that constant desire, forcing himself to sleep at least six hours when he could get it. It was why he maintained his rigorous schedule of deep meditation and tai chi. It was why he played a chess variant called Brazilian Bullet Chess. As in combat, the key to this game was to get inside your opponent’s decision cycle, making him react to what you were doing, rather than the reverse. It was about anticipating your opponent’s move, responding with ever increasing pressure, using your opponent’s speed against him, or letting the clock break him if he countered with deep thought.

  Jack had always followed his gut, but his intuition had taken a remarkable turn for the better. Whether it was chess or physical combat, under the influence of that enhanced state of awareness, he could sense his opponent’s coming move as they made the decision. His intuition had its benefits. Unfortunately, he couldn’t trust it.

  Not that it was wrong. Far from it. The problem was one of targeting rather than accuracy.

  Following his gut could take him down an alley to his target or divert him from his true mission, just because of what he sensed along that path. He could smell danger and it drew him like blood pulled a shark through dark waters. He never knew exactly what waited; only that he hungered for it.

  Watching the clock run out on his latest opponent, Jack reached across the chessboard, shook the woman’s hand, and stood up. The venue for today’s match was a park bench along the southeastern side of the Neckar River. His opponent, a university professor, had just been the latest to succumb to his peculiar skill. The intellectuals always fell hardest, as their memorized opening sequences gave way to thoughtful incredulity and, finally, to slack-jawed disbelief.

  Making his way back to the two-room, third-floor apartment he had rented under the name Greg Hollywell, Jack hung his jacket on the rack just inside the door, stripped off his shoulder holster, and set the nine-millimeter H&K P30S on the chrome-legged kitchen table, right next to his laptop. When he logged in, a new email with an encrypted attachment awaited his attention. The sender address read WatfordElephant87654@gmail.com, a temporary user account that had been set up for this exchange and would never be used again.

  Jack right-clicked the attachment, selected Save As, renamed the file to Roskov.exe, and saved it to his desktop. Running the new executable file brought up a window with a blank text box containing a blinking cursor and an OK button on the bottom right. Opening his browser, Jack navigated to the Wikipedia page for Baker Street and Waterloo Railway, copied the second paragraph, pasted it into the empty text box, and then clicked the OK button. He was rewarded with a spinning hourglass cursor above a message that read:

  “Decrypting contents . . . ”

  Jack walked to the fridge, took out a diet soda, popped open the tab, and tilted it to his lips, savoring the carbonated beverage’s mild burn on his tongue before swallowing. When he returned to the laptop, the window and its spinning cursor had disappeared, leaving a folder labeled Roskov on his desktop. By the time Jack finished examining its contents, the sun had set, leaving the apartment swathed in a darkness that was pushed back by the laptop’s eldritch glow.

  Locking the laptop screen, Jack flipped on the kitchen light, made himself a bratwurst and mustard sandwich, and chased it down with a German beer chilled American cold. Then, stripping off his clothes, he stepped into the tiny shower, positioned the handheld shower head to its topmost mounting post, and let the hot spray wash away another day in a counterclockwise spiral through the small round hole of the shower drain.

  CHAPTER 9

  The mind worm had been called by many names, among them, Anchanchu. Loosely translated, it meant The Rider. Although humans thought of it as a demonic being from their various religious traditions, the truth was something far stranger. It was an entity beyond the four dimensions that compose space-time, able to observe all possible timelines but, until it had discovered the human race, unable to experience any of them, its existence a frustrating hell from which humanity’s arrival on the cosmic stage had offered release.

  Anchanchu learned that, as a human straddled the life–death threshold, it could establish a parasitic link to that person’s limbic system. The mind worm required the host’s cooperation but, once accepted, it could stimulate the human’s physical responses far more effectively than a doctor’s adrenaline injection or electric paddles. If the body was not too badly damaged¸ Anchanchu could shove its host back across that life–death boundary.

  The mind worm’s limbic attachment enabled it to feel human emotion, to experience the world through its host’s senses, to amplify its host’s feelings and bodily responses. But Anchanchu’s lack of connection to the higher brain functions meant it was unable to sense its host’s thoughts.

  While humans offered the mind worm the experiences it craved, they had induced within it a deep and abiding fear of the loss of its playthings. Unfortunately, an alarmingly small fraction of humanity’s timelines lasted beyond their notion of the twenty-first century AD, most terminating with the humans destroying themselves or attracting the attention of advanced species that had no interest in the preservation of primitive cultures.

  Anchanchu knew its hosts better than they knew themselves. It understood what drove them. And with its ability to sense what was coming, it was easy to see the paths along which their amplified passions would carry them. Breaking a new mount to rein was different in every case. With some it was as simple as amping-up specific desires. Though some struggled to resist its siren call and to maintain their sense of self-control, even the most strong-willed succumbed within months.

  But Jack Gregory was different. He crawled a chaotic web of possible futures, his choices determined by such a complex mixture of passion, self-discipline, and his own intuitive sense of what lay just around the next corner that the mind worm found itself unable to determine where those choices would lead.

  It was new. It was disconcerting. It was thrilling.

  Anchanchu had always searched for such a human, one whose actions produced inflection points where humanity’s fate hung in the balance, one who walked paths that might extend mankind’s future. And although it couldn’t foretell which of those paths this mount would take, Anchanchu was certain of one thing. It was in for one hell of a ride.

  CHAPTER 10

  The room opened off the southeast end of the short, second-story hallway. Here in Gasthaus Traurig, in the heart of the medieval walled city of Rothenburg, while the other guests were out on the Night Watchman’s tour or sampling the local cuisine, Jack sat on the double bed in his three-by-four-meter room with the laptop propped across his folded legs, as his vision of the mission fractured into a five-hundred-piece puzzle.

  The picture Rachel Koenig had painted was of her politically connected industrialist husband being blackmailed by a ruthless crime boss, forced to pass along confidential insider information to the Russian Mafia, with threats against Rachel used for additional
leverage.

  As Jack worked his way through the latest data from the lovely and talented Rita Chavez, the strands of Rachel’s story unraveled before his eyes. While Roskov had interests that could make significant money from the type of financial information Rolf Koenig was privy to, his recent activity hinted at something far more troubling. Jack stared at a timeline of Roskov’s travels over the past several months, something he’d specifically asked Rita to research, something she’d initially resisted. It was a search with too much potential to attract attention for information of little value. But Jack had anteed up a bonus and, as usual, Rita delivered.

  Up until six weeks ago, Roskov spent most of his time in Kazakhstan, with frequent trips to Russia and, to a lesser extent, to the former Soviet republics of Georgia, Latvia, and Lithuania. Only occasionally did his travels take him to Western Europe and only for a few days at a time. But lately he’d taken up residence in Berlin, supposedly to oversee operations at Gottfried Transport, a trucking company recently purchased by Keigel Holdings, one of Roskov’s shell corporations. His move to Berlin also corresponded to the commencement of his intimidation of the Koenigs.

  There were other pieces that didn’t fit. Rolf Koenig, for one. The man was more than the CEO of a major space technology company. He was intricately connected with top power brokers within the Deutscher Bundestag and rumored to have parliamentary political ambitions, his future possibly even involving a run at the German chancellorship. Why would he jeopardize that by associating with Roskov?

  Jack leaned back against the headboard. This was normally the phase of an operation where he developed a detailed understanding of his opponent. It was what the military referred to as intelligence preparation of the battlefield. Know your enemy. Know the terrain. Know the conditions under which the battle will be fought. During this process, Jack moved about randomly, picking his locations without establishing any perceptible pattern to his movements, never staying in one location longer than twenty-four hours. Right now he should be touching up the fine details of his plan, not figuring out why his employer had lied to him, not deciding if this was a setup.

  On the Alte Brücke in Heidelberg, Rachel hadn’t been aware of the man tailing her. Of that Jack was certain. And Klaus Diebert hadn’t been expecting Jack. If Rachel had been setting him up, Jack would have sensed it, and a setup would have involved more and better men than Klaus. That meant Rachel didn’t really know what was going on. Just enough to be very, very scared.

  And from what Jack was learning, she had damn good reason to be.

  CHAPTER 11

  The ICE train departed Munich’s Hauptbahnhof at 12:36 p.m., beginning the five hour and forty-eight minute trip to Berlin precisely on time. The Intercity-Express comfort car featured first class seats with available WiFi, individual video screens, and sockets for personal laptops, tablets, or cell phones. Jack stowed his travel bag in the overhead rack, then took a solo seat next to the window.

  Outside the window, the city, with its half-timbered houses, gave way to the rolling hills of the Bavarian countryside, the red-striped, white train picking up speed as it snaked its way along the winding track.

  His attention shifted to the brunette couple seated three rows up on the left. They’d entered the car after Jack had taken his seat and had passed him by, taking no notice, the man in a two-piece charcoal-gray business suit, the woman wearing a navy skirt and blazer over a chiffon blouse. Two business people discussing an important upcoming presentation. The man placed their bags in the overhead rack and removed and folded his jacket, placing it atop his travel case before sliding into the seat beside her. Since their departure from the station, they’d focused on the contents of a folder they passed back and forth, never once glancing in Jack’s direction. They weren’t bad.

  Jack was certain of two things. These two didn’t work for Roskov and they weren’t business executives or salesmen. Sophisticated agency training illuminated their movements, giving them an aura of lethal competency not required for selling widgets. Clearly, they weren’t armed. Or at least they had no firearms on their persons. In their bags, probably, but nothing readily available. That meant they weren’t on this train to take him down, just to make sure he reached his scheduled destination. Whatever was going down would happen there.

  The fact that he was under surveillance puzzled him. He hadn’t been tailed to Munich and nobody else knew his travel agenda. The fact that at least two agents were on this train eliminated the possibility that he’d been recognized by someone at the Munich train station. That meant some agency was actively hunting him, using all the sophisticated means at its disposal, specifically facial recognition technology. As prolific as video cameras were in the U.S., Germany had a camera density that made that laughable. But for the CIA or the German BfV to access that footage on a broad scale indicated a high-profile operation.

  So someone had figured out Jack wasn’t really dead. Not surprising. He hadn’t exactly tried to stay invisible. But his private contractor work had only involved making his high-profile clients’ problems disappear, nothing that should have ruffled either agency’s feathers. With headquarters in Cologne and Berlin, the BfV seemed the most likely party to appear, but these two felt like CIA.

  Since this was a high-speed, non-stop train, getting off early wasn’t a great option. Besides, it would just serve to let his hunters know he was onto them. They’d realize that soon enough. Removing his laptop from his case, Jack woke it from sleep mode, plugged it into his seat’s power receptacle, typed in his twenty-character password, and launched the wipe utility that would perform the multi-pass digital shredding of all data on the encrypted hard drive. A dialogue box popped up, center screen.

  If you are certain you wish to permanently destroy all data on this system, type YES at the prompt.

  Jack typed YES and pressed the ENTER key. He watched the program begin its work, then closed the laptop lid and set it on the floor by his feet. With the limited amount of data on its solid-state drive, it would finish its task long before the train arrived in Berlin. Despite the hardware encryption on the SSD, redundancy never hurt.

  Leaning back in his seat, Jack closed his eyes, using the train sounds to slide into restful meditation. John and Jane Doe couldn’t surprise him. But they’d set the cosmic dice tumbling and his next chance for rest might be a very long time coming. Feeling the thrill of anticipation surge through his body, Jack refocused on his meditation.

  He would enforce self-control. Every day, he was getting better and better at it. And as Jack focused on that mantra, repeating it over and over while he sank deeper into meditation, he almost found himself believing it.

  CHAPTER 12

  Dr. Denise Jennings stared at the computer screen, her detailed mind working to comprehend what Big John was trying to tell her.

  Most people believed the NSA actively monitored American citizens, keeping a vast collection of private information in its Utah data center. The truth was something far different, something the public would find infinitely more frightening. In her classified briefings to the president and to the appropriate congressional oversight committees, Denise described the system as a sophisticated data-mining cyber-structure, hence the name Big John, after the legendary miner in the old Jimmy Dean ballad.

  The truth was that even Denise didn’t understand how Big John did what he did. No data center could hold the information that coursed through Big John’s synaptic system, a system that encompassed an estimated sixty-eight percent of the earth’s computing power.

  The fact that Denise, who had designed the software that formed Big John’s core underpinning, didn’t understand how he worked wasn’t surprising. An outgrowth of the most advanced parallel computing research from Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore, supplemented by work from MIT, Caltech, Carnegie Mellon, and others, Big John was a collection of genetic algorithms operating on a vast, polymorphic neural net.

  It was fed by a software kernel Denise had develope
d in the latter part of the twentieth century under a secret government program designed to support and encourage the hacker subculture. With the rise of computer viruses, Trojan horses, worms, and their endlessly evolving variants, everyone found themselves needing antivirus protection. And unknown even to the antivirus companies that arose to fill that need, Denise’s software kernel was incorporated into almost every one of the antivirus applications. And with each software update, her kernel got better.

  Big John operated on too much data to ever transmit across the internet to a central data center. He needed to touch everything. The elegance of Denise’s solution provided the answer. Each system’s antivirus software scanned every bit of data stored locally, along with all data coming or going over the internet. Best of all, the antivirus software needed to regularly update itself with the latest definitions, and, when it did, her kernel updated itself and delivered its encrypted node weights using the same mechanism. Her kernel didn’t transmit raw data across the network. Each instance on an individual computing platform formed a synaptic patch of neurons, a tiny slice of a much larger brain, an insignificant piece of the vast neural net that was Big John.

  Computers, cell phones, and tablets came and went, were turned on and off, were replaced by newer ones, and Big John shifted and evolved with that changing capability. The information that each synaptic patch analyzed acquired shifting weight patterns in Big John’s correlative data web, a web so vast no databank could store it. The world was Big John’s data bank.