“It’s going to be a little while. Just get everything set.”
For now, sit low, monitor the JWICS, and wait for the USS Louisiana to sail into position in the Gulf of Oman for the 9:00 p.m. ELF transmission.
From the very start, Valkyrie had been aware that things could go either way.
After all, $100,000,000 is a lot of money, and when that kind of dollar figure gets put into play, people’s allegiances have a tendency to become malleable.
So far, Valkyrie had been careful to remain invisible, undetectable while playing people’s loyalties, their agendas against them.
Everything was a distraction layered inside a distraction.
Yes.
Wednesday night, Valkyrie, not Kirk Tyler’s partner, had been the one to film Erin Collet leaving the mall in San Antonio while her father, Dashiell Collet, was being interrogated by Tyler.
Valkyrie had been the one to kill Tyler’s cohort even before Erin Collet exited the back of the mall. Then Valkyrie was the one who’d taken the fresh corpse’s button camera and worn it while following Erin to the car.
Valkyrie was the one who’d drugged her and left her in the vehicle before detonating the cell phone that took off Kirk Tyler’s head.
And of course, Valkyrie was the one who’d sent Alexei Chekov to dispose of Tyler’s body, and arranged for him to speak with Rear Admiral Colberg in Virginia.
And now, Valkyrie was the one making sure everything was going to come together at 9:00.
Tonight, the queen would go up in flames, the Eco-Tech ideologues would be out of the picture, and Valkyrie’s future would be wide open and bold with possibilities.
With $100,000,000 to fund them.
69
6:02 p.m.
2 hours 58 minutes until the transmission
The geoprofile pointed me toward the region east of Woodborough, and I sent word to Tait, who’d since left the sheriff’s department and was now on patrol, to have his men begin searching homes as well as outbuildings and barns in the area. “Start with the ones that are heated. I don’t think Alexei wants Kayla to die.”
I checked my email and voicemail but still hadn’t received any word from Margaret. I tried her number again, and it went directly to voicemail. Annoyed, I left another message for her to call me and to send those schematics as soon as possible.
Earlier in the day, Alexei had hacked into Lien-hua’s cell phone and received, and then interpreted, the signal from somewhere. I knew a few hacking tricks myself, but I didn’t know how to back trace a closed-route wireless loop to find where its receiver might have been.
I wasn’t even sure there was a way to do it, but if there was, Angela Knight at Cybercrime would know how.
I tried her office and was thankful to catch her just as she was about to leave for the day. After a short greeting, she somewhat wearily agreed to a video chat. A quick tap of my mouse brought up the chat window. I hung up my cell and faced my laptop’s camera.
Angela was seated at her workstation, two of Lacey’s monitors to her right. Curly-haired and kindhearted, Angela wore conspicuous glasses and was no longer in the shape she’d been in eight years ago when she first became an agent. She’d been trying to address that issue lately, and instead of her typical can of Diet Coke and stash of Kit Kat bars, she had a bottle of Vitamin Water and a half-finished bowl of miniature carrots positioned prominently on her desk. As she situated herself in front of the camera, she gave me a smile, but it was marked with her typical look of irrepressible concern.
“The DoD sub route analysis didn’t bring up anything,” she began. “That looks like a dead end. Oh, it appears someone using the code name Valkyrie was present in Moscow when Tatiana Chekov was killed. As far as Alexei goes, we’ve learned that the GRU is very interested in finding him.”
“I’m sure they are.”
“The best Lacey could come up with for the ‘Queen 27:21:9’ cipher was Revelation 21:9.”
“How is that Queen 27?”
“Revelation is the twenty-seventh book in the New Testament.”
“But what does it have to do with a queen?”
“I’m not sure, but what troubles me is the reference to the last seven plagues. Here, look.”
She tapped her keyboard, and the verse popped up in a text window at the bottom of my screen. I read: “And there came unto me one of the seven angels which had the seven vials full of the seven last plagues, and talked with me, saying, Come hither, I will shew thee the bride, the Lamb’s wife.”
I’d gone to Sunday school as a kid and knew enough to realize that the Lamb here referred to Jesus Christ.
“The King of kings,” I whispered.
“What?”
“The Lamb is a reference to Christ, but somewhere else he’s referred to as the King of kings, so-”
“The Lamb’s bride would be a queen.”
“Yes.”
“And who is that?” she asked. “Who’s the bride?” I couldn’t tell if she was asking her question rhetorically or not; if she already knew the answer.
“Well, metaphorically, the church, I think, but…” I was no theologian by any stretch of the imagination. “We’ll have to follow up on that.”
Get to the cell phone call. Nail down that location. It’s your best bet at finding Kayla.
“Listen, here’s why I called. Let’s say I wanted to hack into someone’s cell phone, turn on their speaker or camera, and then send that feed back to another computer. What do you know about that?”
“Sure. We do it all the time.” Then she added somewhat hastily, “Whenever we have a warrant.”
“Of course. Well, someone did it with Lien-hua’s phone. I need to back trace the signal, find out where the feed was sent to.”
“A physical location or a device?”
“Physical location, if at all possible.” I relayed Lien-hua’s cell number to Angela, and she tapped it in, then glanced at one of her other computer screens, where a scrolling stream of computer code appeared.
She let her fingers dance across the keys, then gave the screen a fierce look and bit violently through a carrot. “Whoever did this is good. I can locate it, but it’s going to take me some time.”
It didn’t surprise me that Alexei had done a thorough job of covering his tracks. “All right, while you work on that, let me ask you another question. Hypothetically, if I were going to hack into a nuclear submarine, what would I have to do?”
She stopped chewing the carrot, stared directly into her video chat camera at me. “A nuclear submarine?”
“Hypothetically.”
“Whenever someone says ‘hypothetically,’ he’s never talking about something hypothetical.”
“Theoretically, then.”
She looked rebukingly at me over the top of her glasses.
“Same difference, huh?” I said.
“Yes.”
“Can you walk me through it?”
“Which do you want?” She glanced at the screen beside her. “The cell trace or the hacking seminar?”
“Well…”
“Let me guess. Both.”
“And she’s a mind reader too.”
“Mm-hmm.”
She took another carrot, rolled it between her fingers, then crunched into it. “Okay, go to the toolbar, scroll down the View menu, then click on Split Screen/Chalkboard.”
I did as she instructed, and the video chat image on my computer folded in half and fluttered into two windows. The one on the left held Angela’s picture, the one on the right did indeed look like a chalkboard. She picked up a stylus, and as she drew on a data pad beside her, a cloud appeared on the chalkboard window on my screen.
“Here’s the internet.” She added a small arrow pointing to the cloud, then extended a line from it toward the right side of the window and diagramed a series of four boxes separated by short lines. “Here we have external military servers and proxies…” She inserted more lines and boxes to represent additional machines. “And also these are your personal computers, workstations, and so on. At each place where they connect to one of the three Department of Defense intranets, they go through a router that’s supposed to catch malware.”