Germ Read online

  “PKU,” Allen said. “That’s a blood test all newborns get.”

  “Why is he here,” Julia whispered, “on a list with the rich and famous, on a chip people are dying over?”

  She went back to the names, let it scroll to the end. It took several minutes. She wasn’t sure why, but watching those names zip past, knowing they were somehow linked to Donnelley’s death, Vero’s death, the gruesome murder of that man on the video, made her feel sick.

  Stephen must have been uneasy too. He shifted nervously. “How many?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. Five thousand? Ten?”

  “What’s it matter?” Allen said, patting his breast pocket, finding nothing. “We don’t know the significance of these names. Could be a Christmas card list, for all we know.” He opened the glove box and began rooting around. “What are we going to do, phone up Richard Kennedy and everyone else who’s on it? ‘Excuse me, sir, do you happen to know the guy who’s planning to invade the U.S. with the Ebola virus?’”

  Julia suspected that apprehension was a strange guest in Allen Parker’s psyche; showing anger was easier than facing a new emotion. She waited for something else to materialize on the screen. When it didn’t, she leaned over the laptop and started typing. She was digging for more information the way Allen was hunting for a cigarette. Both came up cold.

  She slid back into her chair, seeming to be swallowed by it.

  “What now?” Stephen asked.

  She took a minute to answer. The chip wasn’t what she had hoped it would be. It contained no quick solution, no proof of who was doing what to whom and why; it didn’t even contain evidence they could use—not without knowing what it was evidence of. Like most evidentiary material, it was maddeningly ambiguous, needing to be united with other puzzle pieces before its value became clear. She wanted to kick the computer right off the chair but didn’t have the energy. Finally she took a deep breath and raised her eyebrows to him. “We’ve been here too long. Let’s get moving.”

  “Anywhere in particular?”

  She skewed her mouth, considering. “No,” she said and laughed a little. “Nowhere at all.”

  fifty-nine

  About ten minutes into their journey to nowhere in particular, Allen said, “The planes.”

  “What planes?” Stephen asked. “You mean the crop duster?” “That’s what got me thinking, that and the airstrip on that base.” He had been riding with his feet up on the dash like a teenager. He brought them down and turned to Julia. “Would you agree the people trying to kill us are professionals?”

  “Professional hit men? Yeah, seems that way to me.”

  “Then they’re probably not from Atlanta. Certainly not Chattanooga. Not enough work for them.”

  She saw where he was heading. “They flew in for the job.”

  He nodded. “And I’ll bet they didn’t take commercial flights. They’ve got special weapons. Need to move quickly, on their own schedule. They don’t want too much scrutiny.”

  “So a chartered or private plane?” Julia said. “That’s what I’m thinking.”

  “And landing at the airport leaves a record, a lead.” “Not necessarily. Airports aren’t required to log every landing.

  Most do since 9/11. Sometimes there’s a record only if the plane paid for fuel or overnight parking.”

  “There’ll be records,” she said. “Goody’s killers didn’t make their return flight, and the Warrior stayed awhile. Parking fees are a gimme.”

  “Can you access airport records?”

  “Hey, I’m a federal agent—I can do anything.” She smiled and reached down to maneuver the makeshift table off the floor. Allen moved to help, but she had it in place between the front and rear chairs before he could decide which part of the board to grab. She transferred the laptop to it.

  “Seriously, this thing is loaded with programs that can worm their way into most computer systems. They’re designed for on-site searches of computers used for criminal activities. You wouldn’t believe the gimmicks perps use to prevent their data from making it to a tech lab. Magnetized doorways that wipe out hard drives as police carry them through; reserve batteries that blitz the data with a power surge, triggered by mercury switches to detect movement or zero-current switches that detect when the computer is unplugged. One child pornographer booby-trapped his computer with homemade C-4. It was rigged to detonate if the computer was lifted off of a pressure-sensitive pad. We spotted it before it hurt anyone, but it would have vaporized the evidence, along with the house and a half dozen cops. Anyway, it’s best to seize the data right at the scene. I have programs that slice through the toughest computer security systems like they weren’t even there. Where do I start?” Her fingers were poised over the keyboard.

  “Try General Aviation, Chattanooga Metropolitan Airport.”

  She scooted closer to the computer, eyes flicking from keyboard to screen and back.

  “See what they show for landings, parking, fuel sales, maintenance.”

  A few minutes passed. Then she swiveled the monitor around for Allen to see.

  He leaned in. “Those are the flight progress strips.”

  “Going back two weeks,” Julia said, smug. “But this is where I hit a brick wall. I have no idea what to look for.”

  “Let me see.” He pulled it closer, squinting at the entries.

  “How do you know all this?” she asked.

  “I’ve always loved private aviation. I took some private pilot lessons but never finished. Got too busy. Sometimes I still park by the airport to eat my lunch, watch the planes come and go. Here, look at this.” He read it aloud: “Fourteen-eighteen. Cessna Citation CJ2. N471B.”

  “Yeah?”

  “How many four-million-dollar private jets fly into Chattanooga?”

  “The timing’s right. Just before the killings at the bar.”

  “You think that’s the plane that brought in the two-man hit team?”

  “It’s the Warrior’s. The first two assailants pursued Goody and Vero from Atlanta. The second set of assailants, the ones who came for you at your house, you said one of them had a cop’s badge. A local cop. Maybe by then they were getting desperate, hiring whoever was available.”

  Allen said, “The FAA maintains a plane registry right on the Internet. We can find out who owns that Citation without jumping through techno-hoops.” Something on the screen caught his eye. “Hold on. Oh-five-fifty-one, Cessna Citation …”

  “This morning? He left?”

  “Yesterday morning. Another landed. N-number: N476B.”

  “Two Citations? Sixteen hours apart.” Julia was thinking out loud. “Could the same people own both?”

  “Same type of plane with almost sequential tail numbers? Very likely.” Allen read again from the screen: “Oh-eight-twenty, Cessna Citation.”

  “Another one?”

  “The first one, N471B, took off yesterday morning, two and a half hours after the second arrived.”

  “What are we supposed to do now?” Stephen asked from behind the wheel.

  She gave herself a moment to think. “I suppose we find out who registered the Cessnas. Probably a dummy corporation, owned by another dummy corporation. But if we burrow deep enough, maybe cross-reference the names we dig up with other clues we find along the way, we’ll uncover something solid.”

  Allen didn’t look happy.

  “Welcome to detective work,” she said. “Ninety percent of criminal investigations is following paper trails, digging through computer files, reading receipts and depositions and ledgers until your eyes are ready to fall out. Forget CSI, it’s more like—wait a minute.” She spun the laptop around, away from Allen.

  “Hey.”

  She began typing, staring at the screen.

  “What?”

  “The hard drive. Can’t you hear it? It’s working too hard. Someone’s hacked into my computer.”

  sixty

  “You’re in the airport’s computer,” Allen
said.

  “Maybe they’re trying to hack you back.”

  “That’s not they way it works. If they detect the breech, they just cut you off. Someone’s going through my files.”

  “So cut them off.”

  “I’m trying. They’ve got some kind of protection against that. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  An observer catching her flexing bands of jaw muscles, the determined flash of gritted teeth, would have guessed that she was battling for her life. And they’d have been right: Survival on the run was like a knife fight. The outcome was rarely determined by the planting of one deadly blow, but by the number and depth of slash after slash after slash—until the one most slashed bled to death. She could not afford the injury of giving away access to her computer, whether the intruder’s motive was to find out its contents or destroy its data.

  “Disconnect the phone,” Allen said.

  “If I can stop him, maybe I can find out who it is.” She keyed in more commands. “It’s not working.” She reached for the phone line. The screen went black, and a line of white text appeared at the top:

  > Ms. Matheson?

  Allen, unable to see the monitor from the front seat, asked, “What is it?”

  She told him, then typed:

  > Who is this? The answer:

  > A friend.

  “What’s going on?” Allen stood to lean over the top, bumping the table and nearly dumping everything to the floor.

  Julia caught the computer and phone, stabilizing them on the table once more. “Allen! Sit. I’ll tell you. He says he’s a friend.”

  “A friend? Your friend? What’s his name, Bonsai?”

  “Shhhhh! This isn’t Bonsai. Just be quiet and listen.”

  Speaking the words, she typed:

  > I don’t need any more friends.

  > That’s not what I’ve heard.

  She read the response aloud, already typing her reply:

  > How do you know me?

  > I’ve been waiting for you. I knew you would eventually think to check the airport records. I’m surprised it took you so long.

  Allen whispered, “Is he still going through your hard drive?” “No, he’s just talking.” She wrote:

  > Why did you hack me?

  > Just trying to make a connection.

  “That’s not true,” she said. “He was digging. I think he realized I was onto him and decided to take another approach, instead of just getting cut off.”

  > Ms. Matheson. Your enemy is my enemy. Does that not make us friends?

  > No. Who is my enemy?

  > Atropos.

  “I’ve heard that name,” she said, but she typed:

  > I don’t know who that is.

  > The man who tried to kill you, Dr. Parker, and Mr. Parker.

  “The Warrior,” Allen said. The words continued:

  > Of all the people who kill for a living, he is the worst.

  Julia closed her eyes. It was coming back, who Atropos was. She typed:

  > Atropos is a myth.

  > A myth that almost killed you.

  > Whoever he is, he’s only a hired gun. Are you his employer?

  > Atropos is purely freelance.

  > Did you hire him?

  > No. You know who did.

  “What’s he mean, we know?” Allen said after she read the line.

  “I don’t know.”

  The answer came over the screen:

  > Litt.

  “Karl Litt,” she said, her mind racing. “Goody said his name. We used it in our fake conversation, the one we recorded. They were listening. That may have been the one key phrase they caught. He must think we know more about him than we do.” She typed:

  > Are you Karl Litt?

  > Litt hires killers. He does not engage in conversation. He does not have the resources to find you the way I did.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “He seemed to find us in Knoxville without any problem. Either this guy doesn’t know Litt’s capabilities, or he just wants us to think he’s more powerful than Litt.”

  > How do I know you don’t want us dead as well?

  > Ms. Matheson, I’ve traced you to your computer, which means I know the cell phone number you’re using. I could have simply remained silent and sent people to your location.

  “Except that I realized he had hacked me. I wouldn’t have continued using this phone.”

  “But what if he hadn’t rooted through your hard drive?” Stephen said. “Couldn’t he have found the number you were calling from without your ever knowing?”

  She nodded. “He might have thought he could get away with both—getting a traceable number for us and finding out what’s on my hard drive. But we caught him, so now he’s trying to say what a stand-up guy he is.”

  > So, friend, what is your name?

  > It doesn’t matter, just that we can help each other.

  “I don’t trust people who won’t say who they are,” she said. “All right, then …” She moved her fingers over the keyboard and punched in a series of commands. She stopped and leaned back. “Let’s see how you like that.”

  “What did you do?” Allen asked hesitantly.

  “I sent a worm back to him,” she answered with a smile. “Right now it’s rooting its way into the other computer. And it’s sending data back to us.”

  “Like what?”

  She shrugged. “Letters, address book data, financial information— the kinds of things people keep in their computers. The first thing it looks for are program registration records. They usually contain the name and address of the computer owner.”

  A box floated on the screen, showing the quantity of data her worm had pulled in from the other computer. The number grew larger as she watched. She typed:

  > How can we help each other?

  Nothing. Ten seconds. Twenty. Then the number in the floating box stopped changing.

  “He cut me off.” Her fingers moved over the keyboard.

  > You there? Nothing. “He’s gone.”

  “You shouldn’t have hacked him,” Stephen said.

  “Why not?”

  “He said he could help us.”

  “And what makes you believe him?”

  “What he said, that he could have just sent people after us.”

  “We don’t know he didn’t.”

  She rebooted the laptop with plans to run a spyware-detection program when it was up again. She didn’t want something lurking in her computer she didn’t know about.

  “Who’s Atropos?” Allen asked.

  She shook her head. “A fantasy. Supposedly he’s the world’s best assassin. He can hit anyone, anywhere. Never fails. Always gets away.”

  “He didn’t get us,” Stephen said, defiant.

  “Yet,” she said. “Most assassinations don’t happen the way they do in the movies. They’re rarely clean, quiet kills. Sometimes it takes four or five attempts to hit the target, over days or weeks. Of course, getting them on the first attempt is best; later they’re on guard, probably got some beefed-up security. It gets tougher. Then again, the assassin learns more about his target with each attempt. Patterns and weaknesses. So as long as he doesn’t give up until the job is done, he’s considered successful.”

  “Why did you say he’s a myth?”

  “Maybe legend is a better word. The stories about him get wilder every time you hear them. He’s killed dictators protected by armies. He’s been credited with killing someone in Asia and then, within an hour, killing someone else in America. The story goes, he comes from a long line of assassins. In the eleventh century, an ‘Atropos’ helped Frederick Barbarossa seize control of the Holy Roman Empire. Six hundred years later, Elizabeth Petrovna of Russia was found dead in her bedchamber; despite the official explanation of a sudden illness, some historians claim she was assassinated by a man named Atropos. During World War II, Atropos claimed Allied spies, politicos, and important industrialists as his victims. Just some spot examples I rem
ember. Besides the name, each succeeding assassin shared one trait: he killed with a spiked gauntlet.”

  “Oh, man,” Stephen said. “You’re creeping me out.”

  “I think that’s the idea. He’s the boogeyman for historians and CIA types.”

  She disconnected the phone from the laptop and turned it around in her hand while she talked.

  “I guess he’s kind of a cult celebrity,” she continued. “Look on the Internet. There are fan clubs dedicated to this guy. Some say he was reared from infancy on the skills of his family’s tradecraft. At six years old he learned how to pick locks. At eight he learned that severing the spinal cord at the base of the neck prevents targets from getting off one last shot after you’ve killed them. It’s this lifelong training that makes him so good. And some people think his very lineage adds to his prowess, that each generation yields a better assassin than the generation before him—not because of the training, but because it’s in his blood.”

  “Knock it off,” Allen said, flashing an unsure smile.

  “You asked,” she said.

  “Maybe there’s something to it,” Stephen said. “After all, Julia, you saw him come back from the dead.”

  Her mouth went dry. She had see him slaughtered, only to appear the next day ready for a fight. That was creepy enough, but did it lend credibility to stories about him? To her, it did.

  The tinted window next to her hinged at the top. She levered open the bottom to its maximum opening of about four inches. She was about to drop the phone through when it rang.

  She looked at Allen, who scowled.

  “Private number,” she said and answered.

  “Touche, Ms. Matheson.”

  The voice made her think of her great-aunt’s letters. The writing was thin and shaky, as though written on a paint mixer.

  “I thought you’d like that,” she said.

  “You’re a very capable woman. As I said, I believe we can help each other.”

  “Without knowing who you are, I don’t want your help, and you certainly won’t get mine.”

  Silence.

  “At this point,” he said, “I must tell you that we are dealing in matters of national security. I must be assured that anything I tell you will be kept in the strictest confidence. This goes for you and Allen and Stephen Parker. I am recording this conversation.”