Checkmate (2006)

“And by the way,” Redding said, “the nerds from DARPA called. They want to know what you did with their Goshawk.”

Fisher said, “Let me get this straight: You’re calling the DARPA people nerds?”

Lambert chuckled under his breath. Redding wasn’t known for his sense of humor.

“I’m a geek, Sam. They’re nerds. There’s a profound difference.”

“My apologies.”

“The Goshawk?”

“Safe in the equipment room.”

“And its condition?”

“Hard to say, given how little there was left of it.”

Redding’s eyes narrowed. “Pardon me?”

“There was fire—”

“Pardon me?”

“A joke. Relax, it’s as good as new.”

Redding was already heading for the door. He stopped at the threshold, hesitated a moment, then turned back. “Sam?”

“Yeah?”

“Glad you’re in one piece.”

GRIMSDOTTIRwalked in twenty minutes later. Born in Iceland, A

“Welcome back, Sam. I don’t see anything glowing.”

“The day is young.”

“I talked to the docs at Aberdeen. They confirmed that whatever’s aboard the Trego, you didn’t receive enough of a dose to worry about.” She walked over to a nearby computer workstation and tapped a few keys. A frisbee-shaped 3D model of what Fisher assumed was the hard drive from Tregolaptop appeared on the screen. The disk was broken into irregularly sized geometric chunks outlined in either red, green, or yellow.

Grimsdottir said, “Okay, what do you want first, the good news or the bad news?”

Lambert said, “Bad news.”

“All the red data sectors you see were wiped clean by the self-destruct program. They’re gone, period. No coming back.”

“That’s a lot of red,” Fisher said.

“About eighty percent. Green is probably recoverable; yellow is iffy.”

“And the good news?” Lambert said.

“I may be able to tell who wrote the self-destruct program.”

“How?”

“Most programmers have a signature—the way they block code, handle syntax, write background comments. . . . Those kinds of things. Sometimes it’s as distinctive as handwriting. And I can tell you this: Whoever wrote this program is sophisticated; his signature is unique. It may take me a few—”

Suddenly a muted alarm came over the loudspeakers. In unison, all the computer monitors began flashing, their screens overlayed by a large red exclamation mark.

“Oh, God,” Grimsdottir murmured, staring at the screen.

“What?” Lambert said. “What’s going on?”

“A virus just got past our firewall. It’s attacking the mainframe!”

5

“ SILENCEthose alarms, A

The room went quiet.

“How’s this possible?” Lambert asked. “This is the NSA, for God’s sake, not eBay. How could something get past our firewalls?”

“The laptop,” Fisher murmured.

Grimsdottir nodded, eyes fixed on the screen. “You got it. Colonel, there was a virus buried in one of the hard drive’s sectors. A worm, designed to come alive as soon as it detected a co

“Can you stop it?”

“Working on it. It’s moving fast, spreading through the mainframe. I’m trying to get ahead of it . . . set up a firebreak. If I can divert it into a unused server, I can trap it. Damn, it’s moving fast!”

For the next fifteen minutes Fisher and Lambert watched in silence as she worked. Blocks of green-on-black computer code streamed across the monitor. Grimsdottir’s hands became a blur on the keyboard. Slowly the code seemed to lose momentum, coming in erratic bursts, until finally she leaned back and exhaled. Her face glistened with sweat. Her hands were shaking.

“I got it,” she said. “It’s trapped on an empty archive server.”

“How much damage did it do?” Lambert asked.

“A lot, but it didn’t reach the backup systems, so we’ll be able to rebuild most of the mainframe.”

“And the laptop?” Fisher asked.

“Gone. Well and truly dead. One piece of good news, though: There’s only a few people in the world with the voodoo it takes to write that kind of virus. Give me a day, and I’ll have a name.”

“Go,” Lambert ordered.

ONCEshe was gone, Fisher turned to Lambert. “I have an idea about the Trego.”

“I’m listening.”

“I don’t buy the Liberia registration.”

“Me neither.”

“You can disguise a ship in a lot of ways, but there’s one thing you can’t hide: the engine serial numbers. They’re stamped everywhere. Here’s the rub, though: The FBI will eventually find the numbers and eventually the info will trickle down to us—”

Lambert gri

In this case, “eventually” could mean weeks of bureaucratic wrangling. Fisher returned Lambert’s smile. “Me too.”

Fisher had known Lambert for nearly twenty years, having first worked with him in the Army’s Delta Force, then again as they were both tapped for an experimental program that took special ops soldiers from each branch of the military and transferred them to counterpart units. Rangers went to Delta; Delta went to Marine Force Recon; and in Fisher and Lambert’s case, Delta went to the U.S. Navy’s Special Warfare Sea-Air-Land unit—the SEALs. The idea was to create operators of the highest caliber, trained to be the elite of the military’s special forces community.

Lambert said, “As luck would have it, I’ve already had this discussion with the President. The FBI’s taking the lead on the case, but we’ve been cleared to conduct our own parallel investigation—separate from the FBI.”

Fisher understood the order. While he loathed politics in general and did his best to stay out of it, he knew what was driving the President’s caution: the war in Iraq. Someone had just launched an attack on the U.S. that could have killed thousands of people and rendered a section of the Virginia shoreline radioactive for decades, perhaps centuries. So far, the only suspect was a lone man of Middle Eastern descent aboard the Trego. If America was headed toward another war in the Middle East, the President didn’t want another intelligence fiasco. America had just started rebuilding the credibility it had lost over Iraq. It would be Third Echelon’s job to make doubly sure all t’s were crossed and i’s were dotted.

“Restrictions?” Fisher asked.

“None,” Lambert replied. “We do it our way; gloves off.”

“The only way to fly.”

“Amen. Now, go get some sleep. Tomorrow night, you’re breaking into a U.S. naval base.”

FISHERlived outside Germantown, Maryland, about thirty minutes northwest of Washington, in a small farmhouse surrounded by two acres of red maple and pine. He’d tried living a normal bachelor life: a townhouse, socializing with neighbors, sitting around the pool. . . . But he’d quickly admitted what he already knew in the back of his mind: He wasn’t much of a people person. Not that he disliked people per se, but he had a limited tolerance for most of them.

It was a hazard that came with the job. Dealing with the worst of men in the worst of situations tended to change you. Living in the condo, Fisher had found himself mentally dissecting both his neighbors and his surroundings: threat or no threat; likely ambush sites; clear lines of fire. . . . Living on the razor’s edge, while often exciting, was also all-consuming. You didn’t survive long in special operations without fully immersing yourself in that world. Not having a home where he could let down his guard and decompress had gotten very old, very quickly.