“Guido?”
“Guido Nardini,” Lesser replied. “Some folks would call him a mobster. I, however, prefer to speak of Mr. Nardini as a folk hero comparable to Robin Hood or the Scarecrow of Romney Marsh, immortalized—”
“Cut to the chase,” Milo snapped.
“So, anyway, Guido mentioned to certain parties that I had the Gates of Heaven download and not so very long after that I had a visit from a representative of an ethnic organization based right here in Tijuana.”
“The criminal gang Seises Seises?”
Lesser nodded. “The double-six boys had a proposition for me, and since a Federal indictment was being handed down along with a warrant for my arrest, I decided to take them up on their kind offer of asylum south of the border in exchange for pirating more Hollywood blockbusters.”
“So why did the Mexicans turn on you?”
“Who said they turned on me? I had no trouble with the banditos. Give them a couple of downloads they can turn into knockoff DVDs, teach them a few computer games and they’re happy as clams in a paella. The trouble came when the Chechens arrived.”
Milo blinked. “Chechens? Like from Chechnya?”
“Da, comrade,” said Lesser. “These guys were real self-starters, not like the laid-back Mexicans. Pretty soon the cholos were taking orders from the Chechens and their leader, some guy named Hasan.”
“Did you meet this Hasan?”
“No. But I took his money. Lots of it. Hasan asked me to develop a Trojan horse program that would target a specific auditing program used by the Hollywood studios.”
“Do you know why?”
Lesser shrugged. “I assumed they wanted to rip off the studios with bogus wire transfers of money or something. But the execute file Hasan had me create worked more like a security override program — there were all kinds of protocols to seal or unseal doors, disable alarms and stuff. It seemed more like he was going to knock-off a bank vault than steal currency the easy way — electronically.”
“If you created the program he wanted, then why did Hasan turn on you?”
A shadow crossed Lesser’s face. “Two days ago, Hasan’s agent, a Chechen named Ordog—”
“Ordog?”
“That’s what he calls himself. It means devil or something like that. Anyway, Ordog comes to me clutching a four-gigabit thumb drive. Says it contains a virus that he wanted me to unleash tonight, at midnight, local time.”
“Isn’t that your thing, Lesser. Mayhem and anarchy?”
“Listen, Pressman, ripping off movies is one thing, and I’ve got nothing against ripping off some greedy multinational communications conglomerate, either. But destroying the World Wide Web is where I get off the train. I mean, the Web is my bread and butter, why would I burn my toast?”
“What are you talking about?”
“I took a hard look at Hasan’s little virus while the 66 boys were busy playing computer games. This virus is a monster. The most irresponsible hacker in the world wouldn’t unleash this bug — not unless he never wanted to hack again in this lifetime.”
“What does the virus do?”
“Remember the Rock’em Sock’em Robots’?”
“That kids’ toy?”
“Two robots beating each other until one of them gets his block knocked off. That’s what Hasan’s virus would do — turn every infected computer against every other computer, every infected server against every other server in the Battle of the Network Mainframes.”
“How fast does the virus reproduce?” Milo asked.
“This virus propagates like government-subsidized soybeans. The infected networks would attack the healthy ones, then they would attack one another with overwhelming service requests, confounding data loops, on/off protocols, suicide codes, the works. The only cure would be to shut down the entire system, purge it, or rebuild the system from scratch. I doubt eighty percent of the world’s data would be retrievable.”
“Holy shit, Lesser. Recovery from that would take years—”
“Decades, Pressman. Meanwhile all Internet commerce, all electronic mail and business transactions would be history. We’d be back to doing our work on paper. Hello 1960s.”
“And this virus is going to be unleashed at midnight?”
Lesser shook his head, drew a length of the hemp necklace draped around his skinny throat. A shiny black plastic oval dangled on the end.
“I’ve got the thumb drive right here. According to Ordog, it contains the only copy of the virus. That’s why Hasan and his crew are out to get me. They need this thumb drive, and they need my expertise, to launch the cyber attack.”
“So why did you come here, to this hotel? This room?”
“Cole overheard a conversation among the Seises Seises hermanos about some gringo named Navarro and his bitch, who were staying at this hotel, making noise about looking for me.”
“Where did they get that information?”
Cole Keegan spoke up, his ear still pressed to the door. “From a fat lowlife named Dobyns. Ray Dobyns sold them out, led this guy Navarro into a trap. The Mexicans grabbed him so the Chechens could interrogate him. They’re holding Navarro at El Pequeños Pescados, the brothel I’ve been holed up in for the past couple of weeks.”
“If you were planning to bust out, why didn’t you do something earlier, before Fay…”Milo’svoice trailed off, he swallowed. “Before Tony got captured?”
“I tried to get out of there, warn this Navarro guy—”
“His name’s Almeida. Tony Almeida,” said Milo, breaking protocol.
“Well, I tried to slip away and warn Agent Almeida they were coming for him, but it appears I arrived too late.”
Milo glanced back at the bathroom door. “You were too late, all right, Lesser,” he said bitterly. “Too late for Fay.” Then he turned and met Lesser’s eyes. “But we can still get Tony out of there.”
Lesser adamantly shook his head. “Are you crazy? I just got away from those crazy Chechens, I’m not about to go back—”
“I’ll go with you, Pressman,” Cole Keegan spoke up. “I’ll help get your guy out.”
“Oh, no you don’t, Keegan,” Lesser protested, rising to his feet. “Don’t forget you work for me.”
Cole Keegan shrugged. “I do work for you, and I have your best interests in mind, so I’ll give it to you straight. If you want to get out of Tijuana and across that border alive, we’re gonna need help. And when we get across the border, we’re going to need a few bargaining chips or we’ll end up in a Federal penitentiary. Returning their agent to CTU would signal our good intentions and a willingness to cooperate…. Don’t you think?”
Lesser’s bony body sagged back down onto the wobbly desk chair. Instead of answering Cole’s question, he turned to Milo. “Now you see why I pay this guy a million dollars a year to watch my ass.”
“Because of a legislative deadlock in the Congress, the
Vice President is unable to attend—”
“Regretfully unable to attend.”
Megan Gleason looked up from the monitor, rolled her gold-flecked green eyes. A resident of the Vice President’s home state, she was the very pretty daughter of a very wealthy and generous political contributor with strong ties to the state party.
“I always forget that regretfully part,” Megan said, her pale, delicate features reddening.
Standing over her, Adam Carlisle smiled patiently.