Hidden Agendas nf-2 Read online

  Agriculture and fishing were the main economic activities — ninety percent of the million and a half souls here worked on farms or boats, or processed the crops or fish that came from the land and sea. The primary exports were cashews, peanuts, and palm kernels, and they imported four times more goods than they shipped out — which wasn't saying much. The main local non-agricultural products were soft drinks and beer. National debt was high, exploration of minerals was minimal, and Guinea-Bissau was quite simply among the poorest countries on the planet. Most people here ate rice, and not much of it, and considered themselves lucky to have that. If they lived to be fifty, they were well ahead of the game. Less than forty percent of the population was literate, most of those men. Education was not wasted on women here — maybe one in four could read more than her own name.

  There were no railroads, only a couple thousand miles of badly paved roads, one airport big enough for international flights to land at, and it was cheaper to use local pesos for toilet paper than it was to buy toilet paper. You didn't offer a left hand to greet people here…

  Given a choice, almost nobody civilized would choose to live in Guinea-Bissau. Unless they were at the top of the food chain. The very top.

  At least it was the dry season. During the monsoons, you didn't walk, you waded.

  Hughes leaned back in the car seat and stared at the multicolored swatches of pitiful humanity walking or standing along the street, staring at the passing limo. He was on his way to meet President Fernandes Domingos, a not-particularly-bright man who had somehow lucked into the job. Fortunately, Domingos was bright enough to know a good deal when he heard it. The Presidente had been out of the country, had spent much time in Johannesburg and London and Paris, and had developed a taste for things nearly impossible to enjoy in his own country without a lot more money than he could currently steal. These things included fine wines, finer women, and expensive evenings at the casinos in Monaco.

  If things went as planned, Hughes would make Domingos richer than he had ever dreamed of being, and able to indulge his tastes in more pleasant circumstances than the dirty streets of Guinea. Domingos in turn would make it possible for Hughes to — for all practical purposes — eventually own the entire country.

  Even a third-world pit such as this one currently was had an inestimable value — or it would, in the right hands. Political asylum alone was worth a fortune, not to mention what was hiding under the ground. Yes, Guinea-Bissau definitely had potential, in the right hands.

  In his hands.

  "The Compound is just ahead, sir," the driver said. He was large, white, and had a clipped, posh-English accent. On the seat next to him lay a submachine gun, and Hughes knew that under his chauffeur's coat the driver also carried a large-caliber pistol, and from what else he knew, the man had the ability to use both weapons expertly. He was an ex-British military operative of some kind, hired to make sure the President's special guests got where they were supposed to get in one piece. There wasn't much chance of being assassinated by locals, but the neighboring countries, such as Senegal and Guinea, were always wrangling with Guinea-Bissau or each other, sending ratty armies across ill-defined borders to loot and rape, and there was some small possibility of terrorism from saboteurs.

  Since he was not officially supposed to be here, it would hardly do to have too high a profile — like a shoot-out with some half-baked crazed spy. Fortunately, the U.S. ambassador in this backwater owed Hughes several large favors, and if the man wasn't exactly in Hughes's pocket, he was circumspect in the extreme. You didn't get to be a full ambassador without learning which way the wind blew, then setting your sails accordingly.

  Hughes turned his attention to the palace compound. The main building was big, ostentatious, three stories tall, and made of some slightly pink native stone, with glazed blue tiles on the roof. The architectural style looked to be a bad blend of Mediterranean and Spanish-style villas. The compound was maybe ten acres and a dozen buildings, and surrounded by a fifteen-foot-high matching stone wall topped with what looked like broken glass.

  Hughes shook his head. This kind of spending fit a pattern he'd seen all over the world. The less wealth a country had, the larger the extravagances the top dogs lavished upon themselves. The rich got richer and the poor got poorer. What a surprise.

  The limo arrived in front of a big electrically operated metal gate in the pink stone wall. A pair of guards with assault rifles outside the gate drifted over and bent to look inside the limo. The Brit nodded at them, and it was obvious they knew him, but he offered his ID anyway. The guards checked the ID, then waved at a third armed guard inside the gate at a small kiosk. The gate swung outward to admit the limo.

  The driveway was circuitous, and wound around several sharp-angled turns bounded by ponds or dirt mounds covered with grass. Platt had explained that to Hughes. If you managed to get a car full of explosives through the gate, you weren't going to be able to build up enough speed to ram the palace hard enough to put your vehicle inside before you set it off.

  The President was largely beloved — but apparently not universally so.

  Eventually, the limo arrived at the entrance to the main building.

  Standing in front of a set of tall, carved wooden doors was President Fernandes Domingos, along with a pair of bodyguards and a large-busted but otherwise willowy blond woman in a white blouse, a short black skirt, and three-inch heels. Very attractive, the woman. Domingos's mistress, perhaps?

  Hughes alighted from the limo as the driver held the door. He smiled at Domingos, who flashed a set of perfect teeth in return.

  "Ah, Thomas! How good to see you again!" Domingos spoke good English with an accent from South Africa, the country to which he had been sent for his university education. A university at which, apparently, Domingos had majored in sex, gambling, and drinking.

  The two men shook hands. The President was short and heavyset, with a webwork of spidery veins across his nose and cheeks, visible despite his dark complexion. The broken vessels were probably due to incipient alcoholism. At fifty, he had a dissipated look, an aging rake who needed a magic picture in the attic, but unfortunately didn't have one. His namesake ancestors had been Portuguese, and somewhere along the way they had obviously taken a dip or two into the native pools, for he was darker than most Europeans, and what was left of his thinning, dyed-black hair was very curly. But Domingos's features were otherwise not Negroid, despite Plan's racist slurs.

  "Mr. President. I am honored."

  Domingos waved that away. "No, no, none of that, we are friends! Please, come into my humble home. And I would like you to meet Miss Monique Louis, who has just recently returned from Paris. I am sure you two will get along famously!"

  Hughes eyed the blonde, who smiled lazily at him, a hint of come-hither in her expression. "Bonjour," she said. "So nice to make your acquaintance."

  Ah…

  Unless he was terribly mistaken, the good President had apparently provided him with a… companion. Well. She was attractive enough. And Domingos certainly had enough practice in such matters to have selected an expert trull. Why not? Negotiations could sometimes be arduous, and Hughes might as well relax after they were done — but only afterward.

  The tall doors were carved in bas-relief, images of native people, proud faces and young bodies, most of them nude, a kind of gallery of tribal Africa. Platt must have loved that when he'd seen it. Hughes could almost see the cracker shaking his head in disgust. Except for the naked black women, of course.

  The doors swung silently open, each operated by a black man dressed entirely in white — shoes, pants, shirt, coat. Monique moved over, took Hughes's arm in hers, and smiled at him, and they followed the President into the palace. The bodyguards swung into position behind them.

  This, Hughes decided, should be interesting.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Friday, January 14th, 6:00 a.m. New York City, New York

  At Mac's, one of the last old-style har
d-core gyms in Manhattan, Platt grunted through a set of heavy squats. Wasn't no ferns or New Age music playing here, no chrome and red leatherette magnomachines or yuppie VR slantwalkers, just racks and racks of iron — dumbbells, barbells — and benches and racks and a concrete floor with a few rubber pads on it. Mirrors on the walls and good lighting, the place had those, but that was it. You didn't come here to get a nice glow, you came here to sweat — and to know pain.

  He was in the safety rack, so the weight wasn't gonna fall and crush his ass, but that didn't help his thighs. They burned as though he was standing hip-deep in molten lava. Four hundred pounds on the bar across his shoulders, and after the first set, each rep was a war. He hated squats, hated ‘em, and after a couple of heavy sets, he could barely move. He'd puked more than a few times after squats, in such pain he couldn't even stand up without help, but that was how it went. You wanted to be strong, you had to move big weight, that was the name of that tune. Those little pansies who did leg extensions with fifty pounds and thought they were working out made Platt want to laugh. You didn't see those guys here. Mac would laugh their asses right out of the building.

  Excuse me, sir, but where are the cardiowalkers?

  Why, just go out the front door and a couple of miles that way, hoss. Look for a spa full of sissies, you'll fit right in.

  Down Platt went, legs cooking in their own juices. Below horizontal, butt almost on his heels.

  Up he came, vibrating, shaking, quivering, fire flowing through his veins and arteries, burning his muscles, hot right to the bone.

  Man!

  Three more, and he was able — barely, finally! — to rack the weight. He grabbed a towel, wiped the sweat off his face and neck, and moved to the water fountain. Around him, the clang of steel echoed as men grunted and strained against the big plates. There were a couple of women here, bodybuilders on the juice, so they looked like men. That kind of woman didn't appeal to him at all. He liked to see a woman in shape, but not a male shape caused by mojo steroids that did everything but grow a dick on her.

  Well. Enough of this. Time to shower and head for the place in Queens where he had his throwaway computer set up. The feds were about to get another surprise, courtesy of the Fried Sex gang. A big surprise this time.

  Platt laughed aloud. He didn't see how life could get much better than this.

  Friday, January 14th, 8:00 a.m. Ambarcik, Siberia

  Jay Gridley leaned into the fierce wind coming off the East Siberian Sea, a wind so strong and cold that it would blast an unprotected man to death in a matter of seconds. Enough wind so that the rocks along the shore were bare of snow, despite more than ten feet of it having fallen in the last two months. The snow had been blown away like so much dry talcum powder. The locals here liked to joke about how cold it got. There were people in Alaska or Canada who bragged about throwing a pot of boiling water into the air and watching it freeze on the way down. In Siberia, they liked to say, the water would freeze while still in the pot. Sometimes while the pot was still on the fire, da!

  It was an unlikely place to be hunting for clues to a Danish terrorist organization, maybe more so than any other, but there was a blowhole in the ice up ahead where seals came up to breathe, and one of those "seals" was the packet of information he wanted to find. Jay was armored against the cold — electrically heated underwear, including socks, hat, and gloves — with four layers of material over that — polyprop, silk, wool, and fur — a face mask, and heavy boots. Even so, he felt the cold prying at the mask he wore, digging at the smallest seams in his clothing. This was as close a VR scenario as he could build to what the locals actually faced, and he wondered how they could stand it. The houses here were all heavily insulated, with triple doors and windows, dead spaces in the insulated walls, and even so, you could store your food in an unheated back room and it would keep all winter long.

  Brrr.

  A Klaxon began screaming at him, loud and insistent. What the hell was that? Where was the sound coming from? He turned, put his back to the wind, and saw a tower in the distance.

  Jay did the mental shift and realized that the Klaxon was his real-time override, back at his workstation. Oops. Something bad — the override's threshold was dialed up high enough so only something really nasty would set it off. A fire in the building, a major system failure, the pizza delivery truck had a flat…

  Better check this out quick. Jay logged himself out of VR.

  Friday, January 14th, 8:05 a.m. Quantico, Virginia

  Toni was in the middle of a stack of electronic correspondence when her workstation crashed. One second she was dealing with a memo from Supply telling her that Net Force had exceeded its normal monthly quota of phone and virgil batteries, the next second the screen went blank.

  Crap. Just what she needed, a computer failure—

  The screen relit then, only out for a second or two, but the memo from Supply was gone, and in its place was a picture of a man's hand. All of the fingers were curled down and held in place by the thumb — except for the middle finger, which stood straight up. The image rotated slowly on its axis, and there was no mistaking the ancient obscene gesture.

  She heard her secretary laugh. "What?" Toni yelled.

  "My computer is giving me the finger," her secretary yelled back.

  Toni had a sudden sinking feeling that this image was not confined to just two stations.

  It didn't take long for her to learn she was right.

  Good Lord. Somebody had hacked into the Net Force computer system and given the organization the bird.

  This was bad.

  * * *

  Toni met Jay Gridley as they both headed for the conference room. Joanna Winthrop beat them there by half a second. Alex was already there. He didn't even wait for them to sit down before he started in.

  "All right, what the hell happened?"

  "Frihedsakse," Jay and Joanna said simultaneously. They glared at each other, then both tried to talk at once.

  "I found the—"

  "They came in by—"

  "One at a time," Toni cut in, before Alex could say it. "Jay?"

  "They got in through a subsystem in FBI Personnel. It's a dedicated Direct Line used for submitting resumes and job applications. In theory, it's not supposed to be cross-linked with secure systems without gate passwords for every upload or download, but in practice a lot of times, somebody opens the link to supervisors looking for new employees, and they leave it open so they don't have to spend five minutes every time they need to relink to send a file. Somebody got in on that line and into our mainframe."

  Toni could see that Joanna was eager to talk. "Lieutenant?"

  "Our circulating antivirals caught the program almost immediately. There was no damage to hardware or software. The rotating hand image was already on file, and it looks as if the hack was designed to get in, open that visual, and post it to our system as an EWS — Emergency Warning System — override. As far as I–I mean, as far as Jay and I can tell — nobody lost any data, and the virus didn't do anything else."

  "We're running full diagnostics," Jay added, "but I can guarantee they won't find any more infection. This is nothing, a simple encapsulated program, the kind of thing a kid hacker would do just to show he could. They gave us the finger. Big deal. No harm, no foul."

  Alex shook his head. "You're wrong, Jay. This is a major hit."

  Jay frowned, but Toni saw from her face that Joanna understood.

  Toni said, "Net Force is supposed to be the guardian for the nation's computer systems. If this group can get into our supposedly secure setup, how does that make us look? What kind of confidence is this going to inspire in our clients, when it comes to protecting their systems?"

  "But it doesn't matter that they got in," Jay said. "They couldn't do anything! Our automatics nailed the program within a couple of seconds. It opened a picture we already had in our files. All the picture did was just sit there and shine. It couldn't have done anything else no matter
what. We were back on-line before most people even noticed it. It was a glitch, no damage, zip city."

  "We're not talking programs here," Alex said. "We're talking politics. It doesn't matter that the terrorists didn't do any damage, what matters is that they got in. Even if you and I know better, people who don't understand computers are going to be afraid. Sure, they'll say, the Net Force bleebs say no big deal, but so, if it's no big deal, how come they didn't keep them out in the first place?"

  Jay shook his head. "But — but—"

  "Toni, see what you can do for damage control," Alex said to her. To Jay and Joanna, he said, "Try and backwalk this, see if you can get us any leads. I have a feeling this is going to get real ugly on us if we don't short-circuit it pretty quick. Go."

  After Jay and Joanna were gone, Toni sat alone with Alex.

  "You okay?" she asked.

  "Yes, of course, I'm fine. It's just all this." He waved one hand to encompass Net Force and all its problems

  But he wasn't fine, she could see that. He had been tighter than a violin's E-string since he'd come back after Christmas. At first she'd thought it was because of his little adventure in the desert that he didn't want to talk to her about. But that wasn't the kind of thing to bother him, at least not as much as he seemed to be bothered. He'd come out a winner, captured a bad guy, no loss of face there. If anything, he came off kind of heroic. Men admired that kind of thing in other men.

  She hadn't asked about his visit with his daughter and ex-wife, he hadn't volunteered, and Toni suspected that maybe the visit hadn't gone well. Even divorced, that woman seemed to run Alex's life long-distance, and Toni hated her for it. And the woman had to be stupid; otherwise how could she have ever let Alex get away from her?

  But it wasn't Toni's place to ask, not given their strictly professional relationship. All she could do was offer opportunities for him to talk. If he didn't want to do that, she couldn't make him.