Jay got through the baggage car. Just ahead was the conductor’s office. Jay knocked, and when nobody answered he slipped the lock with a credit card and stepped inside. If the conductor had been in his office, Jay would have offered some excuse, gone away, and created a diversion that would have drawn the man out.
A file cabinet stood near the conductor’s desk, but it was partially open, not even locked. Jeez, Louise! Not that the lock would have stopped him, but still, they didn’t have to make it so easy. It was amazing to him how often people who should know better left their doors unlocked.
A few minutes shuffling through papers came up with what he wanted: a passenger list. He looked at several other manifests, on the off-chance somebody might someday notice he had poked around in here. No point in being obvious about what he was looking for.
Jay recognized several of the names on the passenger list from his own list of high-end computer program grads. And there, plain as day, was the name he had come to find.
Jackson Keller.
So, this was where he was, and this was where his primary team was, too.
Jay put the list back into the drawer, went to the door, peeked out. Nobody around.
He hurried back toward the baggage car. He had what he wanted. Time to leave.
“We’ve got a hacker incursion,” Taggart said.
Keller stared at her. “Incursion? Not a failed attempt? Impossible!”
“Not in our systems. In the train’s op comp. We got a bounce-back from Deutsche Bahn Access, said he wasn’t who he said he was. I checked it: The hit came in off the sat pipeline from EuroAlliance One, not from any registered Deutsche Bahn connections.”
“Let me see.” He moved to the work station where Samantha Taggart, the security monitor for this shift, sat.
“Nothing to see,” she said. “He’s come and gone.”
“What did he do?”
“Nothing to speak of. He accessed several housekeeping files. Didn’t take anything, didn’t leave a worm or virus behind. Probably some kid trying out a new cracker program.”
“Which files? Never mind—” Keller tapped in a key sequence. The file list appeared in a real-time crawl on the holoproj. Mail manifest, cargo bills of lading. Passenger list. Station stops. Who would bother? There was nothing there to see.
“You back-walked him?”
“Far as I could. It was an anonymous sig from somewhere in the NoAtlantic Net; it frayed eight hundred ways from Sunday past that.”
“That would be pretty sharp for a kid hacker.”
“I used to do it when I was a kid. You used to do it. It’s not that hard.”
Keller chewed his lip. Nothing was taken. Nothing there to take, really. Who could possibly care where the train stopped, what it carried for cargo or mail, or who was on it—
He blinked. He opened the passenger file. There they were, his team, himself, the train crew. He felt a sudden cold rush in his lower belly.
Gridley!
He shook his head. “Can’t be. He doesn’t even know who we are.”
“Excuse me?”
He looked at Taggart. “Nothing. Never mind. You’re right, it was probably some kid screwing around. No harm, no foul.”
But as he walked away, Keller’s fluttering bowels didn’t settle down. If it wasn’t some kid trying to break into a system just for the hell of it, then who could it be? And the only answer was: somebody who wanted to know who was on the train. Maybe Gridley had figured it out. Maybe that old Thai persona Keller had used had been too good a clue. And if it was Gridley, and he knew Keller was on the train with his team, then they were in deep trouble. If the Americans thought this train had anything to do with the net and web disruptions, they would be all over the Germans to pull it to a stop and have a look-see. Somebody high up in the German government would surely owe a favor to somebody high up in the U.S. government, and even if not, there could easily be a quid pro quo offer in a big hurry: Scratch our back, Hans, and we’ll scratch yours, yah?
And if Gridley knew about this platform, maybe he knew about the barge in Yokohama, too. It wouldn’t be safe there, either.
He had to get off the train. Fast.
32
Michaels looked at Jay, then at John Howard, the other man in his office. “It’s iffy,” he said.
Jay nodded. “Yep. I don’t have ironclad proof. But I’m positive of it. Keller is the guy leading the charge. He’s got the chops, and CyberNation is the organization that stands to gain more than anybody. Last week, he and his team were on the boat, and now they are on a big ole electric train in Deutschland. If we can grab them, I bet we can squeeze a confession out of one of ’em. And sure stop anything they are planning.”
“There’s due process for you,” Michaels said.
“Hey, the Germans got stung when the net went wonky, people all over the world lost money. If they don’t have Miranda warnings, that’s not our concern, is it?”
“I think you’ve been watching too many World War Two movies, Jay. They aren’t all Nazis over there anymore. People have rights in Germany now.”
Jay shrugged.
“What I want to know more about is this connection among the three locations,” Howard said. “The train, the barge in Japan, the ship.”
Jay said, “Triple redundancy. I think each of these has got identical computer systems set up. They share the information. If something happens to one, they still have two backups. That’s how I’d do it. We got at least a backup off-site ourselves now, the new substation in D.C.”
“So it wouldn’t do us any good to take out the train by itself.”
“Well, General, it would tell us for sure if these guys are the villains if we got a look at their hardware and software. Don’t we have any spies who can do a walk-through in RT?”
“We’ve already got a spy on the boat,” Michaels reminded him.
“Yeah, but she’s not supposed to poke around in the private decks, just gather info that’s public. Besides, we know that Keller is on the train now anyhow. I’m telling you, this is the real deal.”
Michaels shook his head. “Even if I believed you — and it happens I do — we don’t have enough to start arresting people, even via another government. And if we could shut down the train and the barge at the — where was it? the shipworks? — that would still leave the gambling ship down there in the Caribbean. If they are about to do something else nasty, wouldn’t that be likely to precipitate it?”
Jay shrugged. “I dunno. Maybe. But they might not be ready to go for it yet. Our defenses have gotten better. It’ll be harder next time. Plus if we get Keller and his big guns, that’s gonna monkey wrench it. The second team won’t be as good.”
“If that’s all they do,” Howard said.
Michaels looked at him.
“Remember that cut transcontinental fiber-optic cable? Where they found the two dead militiamen? Have we considered that they might be linked?”
Michaels shook his head. “Why would you say that?”