Dulwich slides the envelope across the table like it’s radioactive.
“Your schedule, not mine,” Knox says. He finds the Red Room claustrophobic. He can handle small spaces; a top-secret facility, impenetrable to all eavesdropping technologies, causes undue pressure.
Dulwich taps the envelope.
David Dulwich is usually not the melodramatic type. It’s one reason Knox doesn’t mind doing the occasional piece of work for him. The rest of his time, John Knox is a trader, traveling the world for rare goods, in business with his younger brother, Tommy. Dropping into a James Bond movie is a little much.
“Sarge?”
“They’re of you. The pictures. You love looking at yourself, Knox. So go ahead.”
“Moi?” Knox fails to entertain his host. “Why?”
“Why what?”
“I have plenty of pictures of myself, all of them stunning.”
An uncomfortable smirk crawls across Dulwich’s lips. “Not like these you don’t.”
Knox suppresses the urge to take the bait. He wants more from Dulwich, who knows that Knox is a reluctant freelancer. His brother, Tommy, isn’t in the best shape — the experts call him cerebrally and physically impaired, autistic, mentally challenged. He is, in fact, highly functional with medication and care. Knox can’t risk leaving him alone on this earth — but he’s attracted to the work Dulwich offers for more than just the money. He has a savior complex that probably bleeds over from caring for his damaged sibling.
Still, he’s in no hurry to screw things up by rising to the wrong fly. Dulwich will eventually play the money card. Knox has been robbed, embezzled from by his company’s bookkeeper. Things are tight. Have been for some time.
But Dulwich doesn’t start there.
“I don’t go in for drama,” Dulwich says.
“An understatement.”
“This is an in-and-out — a week tops — that can do a lot of good.”
“Good, like Amsterdam?” Dulwich understands which buttons to push.
“No, not like Amsterdam. Not even close. Frog and the scorpion. Open the envelope.”
Knox doesn’t understand the reference but doesn’t want to appear ignorant. He wants to open the envelope — oh, how he wants to; but there’s commitment that accompanies the act, and he can’t bring himself to do it without knowing more.
“Political?” Knox wishes he had hidden the astonishment in his voice. Like all private contractors, Rutherford Risk’s bread and butter comes from U.S. government jobs: guarding convoys of supplies, providing security details, moving funds, interrupting the Internet, burning drug crops. It’s the occasional insurgency Knox wants no part of.
“Open the envelope.”
“Wrong guy.”
“Turns out you’re the only guy, or we wouldn’t be locked in the Red Room.”
“Maybe you should unlock the door.”
“Maybe you should open the envelope. There are good guys and bad guys on every team, Knox. Even good teams have their share of bad apples. But I wouldn’t put you on the bad team. Not ever. Now, goddamn it, look—”
Dulwich takes the envelope back, opens it and slams down a handful of 8x10s. Shot with a high-powered telephoto at a good distance.
Knox can’t pretend it’s not his profile. It takes him several long seconds to digest the look of the café and the apparent location: Bethany, Jordan. That gives him the other man in the photo, a man with Jordanian and Circassian blood, Akram Okle.
“I was never told flat out,” Knox says, defending himself, “that the piece was black market. Every antiquity has passed through too many hands to count. Sometimes that includes mine. I’m offered a piece; I know a buyer. More like a matchmaker. I can see how that might be politically embarrassing, but I don’t work for you, Sarge. I’m not your employee. I’m a contractor. I—”
“You are so off base you’re running around the outfield.” Dulwich flips through the stack of photographs. Three show Knox and Okle engaged in what Knox thinks must be their most recent deal; more troubling are the final two photos, which go back eighteen months earlier. There’s no way Knox has been followed for eighteen months; he keeps track of such things. So it’s Okle who’s being surveilled.
“Okay, I give up. The frog and the scorpion?”
Dulwich arches his eyebrows as if Knox should know this one. “Frog and a scorpion meet on the riverbank. Scorpion asks for a lift to the other side. Frog says, ‘Why would I do that, you’ll sting me.’ Scorpion says he won’t and they sign a treaty. The frog carries him on his back. Halfway across, the scorpion stings the frog. As they’re both going under, the frog says, ‘Why would you do this? We’re both going to die!’ Scorpion says, ‘It’s my nature…’”
“Akram’s a good client,” Knox says. “I see certain pieces, I think of him first. He only buys the rarest of the rare. There aren’t many people who can afford such things. You go where the market is.”
“He’s a middleman.”
“None of my business.”
“It is now.”
3
Rutherford Risk pays out six figures to employees at various Internet security companies, on top of the seven figures budgeted for their own hackers who roam cyberspace probing for firewall vulnerabilities. When a back door is discovered in an existing operating system, Rutherford receives an alert before Microsoft or Adobe or Sun or Apple can identify the issue, a day or two before they can offer a patch.
During that window — hours, or minutes sometimes — people like Grace Chu, a private contractor based in Hong Kong and specializing in forensic accounting, are able to slip through the back door undetected.
Thanks to other sources on the inside of those companies, Grace Chu is also told when to get out.
Most of her days are spent poring over spreadsheets or money wire transactions, establishing trails and hard evidence for the client, most typically Rutherford Risk. Today she works like a day trader, jumping in and out of the market, seizing opportunity, playing margins. She’s attempting to establish and trace an individual’s net worth. It’s a nerve-racking exercise not meant for the faint of heart. A moment’s hesitation and the SEC or FBI will have her location. Get out too quickly and she loses her only chance at access.
Today she’s inside the server of a Jordanian bank; tonight or tomorrow, if the current back door holds, an Iranian investment firm. She’s curious about the op. Yesterday, Dulwich instructed her to data-mine this man’s financials. Dulwich wants her travel plans left open. He sounded uncertain. It’s new territory — Dulwich at sea, running her personally. Success will mean promotion; she can taste it. To prove herself as a field operative capable of on-the-fly intelligence gathering and analysis will put her in a class by herself. She knows of no one at Rutherford Risk with this particular hybrid skill set.
She works wirelessly using a “hopper”—a cellular Wi-Fi device that jumps among three carriers randomly, the same technology that makes her jailbroken iPhone impossible to eavesdrop on. It costs her some speed, but she has grown accustomed to the pauses.
She’s working from the downtown campus cafeteria of the University of Hong Kong, meaning her IP address is shared by a few hundred at a time, making a quick trace difficult, if not impossible. She’s stolen a user ID and password off a nearby, far too casual user.
The bank’s firewall is impenetrable. The last effective cyber raid was in 2004. This back door they’ve been given is far more benign — it’s for the bank’s local area network, which includes all web searches, most e-mail traffic, video conferencing data as well as the security server.