The real estate registry showed that Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Grant had purchased a home on Pickfair Drive in northwest Austin ninety days earlier for the price of $425,000.
All of this was information to be stored away. Nothing useful now, but it might come in handy later. He saved the pages to a new folder in his ONE Platinum account before placing a call to Investigations.
“This is Ian. I have a Social Security number for you. Give me a full workup. And make it a priority.”
16
“Mr. Briggs,” called the guard. “Your badge.”
Peter Briggs stormed past the porter’s lodge of Brasenose and continued to the elevators. He was fed up. There was only so much you could take of hanging around a bunch of grown men who grew sexually aroused talking about petaflops and hard drives and GPUs. He was certain that Patel had been sporting some wood as he brushed up against Titan.
Briggs got off at the third floor and headed for the operations room. A dozen men sat at desks positioned along the perimeter of the office. Not one of them gave a flying fig about petaflops or hard drives or GPUs. Briggs was certain about that.
“Fire under control in K.L.?” he asked.
“Damage localized to a chip storage area.”
“Plant back on line?”
“Yessir.”
“Outstanding.”
Running security for ONE was a twenty-four-hour-a-day job. Briggs had a thousand employees under his command, safeguarding the corporation’s offices and manufacturing facilities in twenty countries around the globe. His responsibilities broke down into three areas: physical plant and manufacturing, cybersecurity, and personal protection.
Cybersecurity was giving him the biggest headache these days. ONE’s servers were under attack from hackers day and night. Most came from China or eastern Europe. The Chinese attacks emanated from a military unit charged with gaining industrial espionage secrets from Western companies. The eastern European attacks came out of Bulgaria and Romania, the work of organized criminals contracted by smaller technology companies to steal ONE’s R &D. Between the two, ONE defended itself against more than five thousand attacks a day.
As was his habit on entering the ops room, he checked an electronic world map that broadcast the location of the company’s top executives.
Today he noted that ten were in Austin, four in Palo Alto, two in Mumbai, two in Guangdong, one in Berlin, and one in Nepal.
“Get the plane ready for D.C.,” he said to Travel. “Party of five plus crew. We fly at dawn. Boss wants the Kraut. Tell her to be at the airport at five a.m. and to make sure she has her bag of nostrums.”
Travel looked up. “Bag of what?”
Briggs patted his shoulder, pleased to be in the company of a man with a vocabulary nearly as limited as his own. “Never mind, lad. Just call Katarina and get the plane arranged.”
“Yessir.”
There was a new symbol on the map that Briggs hadn’t seen that morning. The symbol was a silhouette of a jet, and it appeared whenever company execs were en route or due to embark on a flight. He touched the jet and its flight information appeared on the screen.
ONE 7 / N415GB
JER-AUS 7.31 .
0700MST-1900CST .
ONE 7 was a Boeing business jet with tail number N415GB, departing from Jerusalem at 0700 hours local time and arriving in Austin at 1900 hours tomorrow night.
The Israelis were coming.
Briggs couldn’t help but feel his pulse quicken. Ian was right. They could not afford any more slipups. Not now, with Titan up and running. Not with the Israelis on the way.
Briggs continued to his office. First there was ONEscape, the browser, then came software, and after that hardware: servers, routers, switches-the machines that made up the Internet’s backbone-then ONE Mobile, the wireless phone carrier, and now, just a few months back, Allied Artists, the country’s biggest movie and television studio.
But all of it was but a prelude for the Israelis. Ian had called them his Praetorian Guard and talked about a “new Jerusalem.” Briggs knew better than to ask about a new messiah.
He sat at his desk and pulled up the report from his contact at the FBI. Semaphore. It was the case that wouldn’t die.
“Go easy,” Ian had said. “Nothing heavy-handed.”
But Briggs hadn’t gotten where he was by going easy. He hit speed dial for Firemen.
“I need a team to do a little scouting work for me. A local job.”
“Level?”
Level one, or L1, was a simple look-and-listen on a target’s phone and Net usage.
L2 added wireless surveillance, plus eyes on the subject for defined daily intervals.
L3 amounted to a digital cavity search-all of the above plus twenty-four-hour surveillance and infiltration of the target’s home or office with the goal of installing malware to take full operational control of all the target’s digital systems: tablet, laptop, desktop, mainframe, and mobile communications devices.
“L2,” he said.
“How soon do you want work to begin?”
“Immediately.”
“Have anyone in mind?”
In the end there was really only one team he could trust with the job.
“Get me Shanks and the Mole.”
17
Showtime.
Tank Potter parked at the back of the office lot and checked his appearance in the mirror. Hair freshly washed. Eyes marginally red. Shirt clean and pressed. All in all, not too bad after twelve hours in the clink.
He reached into the bag on the seat beside him for a box of Band-Aids. His hand shook as he freed one from the box and shook more as he struggled to peel off the wrapping.
Reinforcements needed.
He dropped the bandage and delved under his seat for his backstop, ducking his head below the dash to take a pull of tequila. His hand was rock-steady as he peeled off the wrapping and affixed the Band-Aid to his forehead.
“Thank you, JC.” Jose Cuervo, not the other guy.
For a minute he looked at the Statesman’s headquarters. Thirty days and all this was history. It didn’t come as a surprise. Every paper in the country was slashing its staff, and he was no Pulitzer winner. Even so, he’d thought it would be easier.
A last helper to calm the nerves and he was good to go.
He stashed the bottle, then rummaged in the glove compartment for his Altoids, counted out five, and popped them into his mouth. Fortified, he climbed out, feeling capable, calm, and only mildly hungover.
–
“Potter!”
Al Soletano stood outside his glassed-in office in the center of the newsroom, hands on hips, his face flushed a shade past fire-engine red. Tank raised a hand in greeting as he made his way down the main aisle. The newsroom was a sea of vacant cubicles. A plague zone, he thought as he entered Soletano’s office.
“Sit.”
“I’m okay.”
“I said sit.”
Tank sat down in the visitor’s chair.
“How you feeling?” Soletano was short, with a gut, a tonsure of black hair, and a voice that could be heard in all six neighboring counties.
“Not bad, all things considered.”
“Your head?”
“It hurts, but I’ll be all right.” Tank had spoken to Soletano as soon as he was freed from the holding cell. He had a story ready. He’d been in a fender bender, banged his head, and spent the night in the emergency room.
“You don’t have to be going fast to do some damage.”