“Do not tell me what I want. No one tells Azra’iel what he wants.”
“It’s okay,” Liv said in English, moving from behind him, doing her best to ignore the gun as it swung back to point at her.
“What are you — American? English?” the rider said, picking up on the switch in language.
“American. I’m from New Jersey.”
Azra’iel sat high in his saddle and swept his arm across the desert landscape. “This is where I am from. My family has lived on this land for two thousand years. We have seen the great caliphs come and go, then the Mongols, and then the Turks.” He jabbed the barrel of his gun at the ribbons on his chest. “Saddam Hussein gave me these himself for defending his republic against the American invaders, but he was an idiot and now he is dead. I was not fighting for him, I was fighting for the land. And now the land belongs to me.”
Liv held his gaze and slowly shook her head. “The land does not belong to any man,” she said. “It is we who belong to the land.”
“You are wrong, goddess. It belongs to any man who will fight for it — this is what my people have learned — and you did not fight.”
“No. We welcomed you. We invited you to share it, in peace. Isn’t that a better way?”
The jagged smile returned. “Better for me.” He turned away and raised his voice so all could hear. “This oasis is ours now. I give you a choice. You can leave or you can die. You have two minutes to fill your canteens. I advise you to take as much as you can. The desert is not as friendly or as welcoming as your goddess.” He turned his horse and started walking it away.
“We could fall back to the transport shed,” Tariq whispered. “There are guns there. We could make a stand. Or if we make a diversion when we head through the gates I think I might be able to make it to the top of one of the towers and turn the big guns on them.”
“Then what? Bury the bodies, wait for the next group of people to show up and kill them too?”
“What else can we do? We won’t last two days out in the desert without water. Better to fight and maybe die here quickly than slowly out there in the furnace.”
“Better not to die at all,” she said.
“You have something else in mind?”
She swept her hand through the water, her fingers dragging through the cool, wet earth at the bottom, remembering the symbols on the Starmap. “No,” she said, watching the swirls of earth eddying in the clear water, turning it a dusty red. There was something familiar about all this, she had seen something like it in the stone. She tried to concentrate on it and bring it to the front of her mind, but it continued to elude her, like something glimpsed at the edge of her vision. “If you want to go, then go,” she said, turning to Tariq. “I’m sure you could make it to Al-Hillah on foot before the thirst takes hold.”
“What about you?”
She glanced up at the grave site, visible through the line of riders and the chain-link fence. “I’m staying here,” she said, “or as close as I can manage without getting shot.”
Her hand passed through the water again, sending larger clouds of red mud spreading in it as she stood and walked toward the riders.
“Good-bye, Malik,” she said as she passed through the line.
His smile faltered and he made as if to reply but she was already gone, striding toward the open gate and out into the desert without once looking back to see if anyone was following her.
19
The National Cyber Crime Task Force was buried deep in the Maryland bedrock and housed a huge bank of central databases that fed the entire law enforcement network as well as hard drives and backup files relating to hundreds of thousands of cases — everything from simple Internet scams and corporate fraud to online pedophile rings and major terrorist networks.
The main machine room was practically deserted by the time Shepherd stepped into its air-conditioned gloom. He had stopped to splash water on his face and grab something to eat after Franklin had failed to make good on his offer to buy him a burger, wolfing down a doughnut and a cup of coffee on his way over. No food or drink was allowed in the cyber crimes labs. A seated figure was silhouetted against three large flat-screen monitors on the far side of the room, his fingers punching code into a keyboard so fast it sounded like tap dancing. He turned at the sound of Shepherd’s approach and smiled a greeting. “Agent Franklin said you’d be along.”
Agent Smith was one of the senior instructors in the cyber crimes division. There was a rumor that did the rounds each year that the Agent Smith of the Matrix movies had been based on him and there was certainly more than a passing physical resemblance — same dark hair receding from a widow’s peak, same sharp features on top of a whip-thin frame — but that was as far as the comparison went. The real Agent Smith was just about the friendliest instructor in the building, generous with his time and endlessly patient with those who were never going to pound the cyber beat but needed to understand enough to pass the module anyway.
“I’ve set you up with a ghost file,” he said, nodding at the terminal to the right of his.
Shepherd sat at the desk and assessed the data. In cyber crime there are two types of evidence: physical and digital. Physical evidence is the actual hardware itself. Often in the chain of evidence it has to be shown that a suspect has used a certain computer, so fingerprints or even microscopic flakes of skin beneath the keys of keyboards are sought to prove it. Digital evidence is different. Files and directories can be cloned or copied and worked on by several teams of people at once to crunch the data faster. These clones are called ghost files and Shepherd was looking at one now, an exact copy of everything on Dr. Kinderman’s hard drive. “Find anything yet?” he asked.
Smith continued to machine-gun code into his terminal. “The most interesting thing I’ve found so far is nothing.” He hit a key and folders started opening, rippling down his main screen like a deck of cards, every single one of them empty. “Everything you would expect is there up until eight months ago, then there’s nothing at all. No directories, no subdirectories, no caches. Whoever cleaned this out really knew what they were doing.”
Shepherd had been hanging on to the hope that Smith would find something in Dr. Kinderman’s personal files, an e-mail, or a virus that had originated elsewhere with a pathway that might give them a new lead. But the efficiency and skill with which the drive had been forensically wiped just threw more suspicion on Kinderman. “You want me to start checking through the older data, see what I can find?”
“You can if you want but I think it will be a waste of time. Anyone this thorough is unlikely to have left anything behind — I’m pretty sure anything incriminating on the drives would have been in the chunk of data that’s now missing. I was just about to run it through CARBON, see what that throws up.” He hit return and a progress bar popped up on the screen, then he sat back with a small grin on his face that had “ask me” written all over it.
“What’s CARBON?” Shepherd obliged.
“That is something very confidential that I can divulge to you only now that you’re a serving special agent. But what I am about to tell you does not get mentioned in the classroom, understood?” Shepherd nodded.