Robert Ludlum's (TM) The Bourne Initiative (Jason Bourne series)(3)
The right-hand wall was a 4K video loop of aerial footage of the Swiss Alps. An hour from now, it would be scenes shot from a boat prowling the Maldives, and the hour after that, the crowded streets of midtown Manhattan. And so forth. No one ever complained about the lack of windows; no one looked up when Morgana strode in, which was just the way she liked it. Her cadre of six had eyes and minds glued to their laptop screens.
There were no partitions between workstations. Thick cables rose from each station to tracks hung just below the ceiling, which allowed Morgana’s staff to move around at will, huddle together for impromptu conferences, exchange vital information in real time. Everything on the flat-panels was in real time. Real time meant everything to the operators of Meme LLC; being current was their currency. Morgana fostered a cluster method of cryptanalysis, hence the screens. All Meme’s projects were collaborative efforts. This led not only to one success after another but to a close-knit comradeship among the team impossible to achieve inside the federal government’s myriad clandestine services.
Morgana passed through a narrow door set discreetly in the far wall. There was no nameplate beside it. This was Morgana’s sanctum. From here, she could monitor everything that went on in the outer room. She also had the freedom to turn it all off, and in the semi-darkness contemplate algorithms and her future.
Setting her cappuccino down at her workstation, she removed her jacket, slung it over the back of her ergonomic task chair, sat down. The moment she did so, the screen on her laptop flared to life. Her thumbprint was scanned, and she was in.
There was the usual slew of email messages waiting in her in box, but there was also one that was flagged.
Uh oh, she thought. Black Star.
She knew what Black Star meant, and it wasn’t usual in any way, shape, manner, or form.
She clicked on the icon. Instead of opening the message, she was taken directly to the office of General Arthur MacQuerrie. His wind-burned, time-lined face filled the screen. His baby blues stared out of the screen as if he were Dr. Strange, who, along with Wonder Woman, was one of her favorite comic book heroes. The analogy was apt. Her boss at NSA was something of a magician. How he kept her unit secret from the mandarins floating at the top of the governmental alphabet soup—NSA, CIA, DIA, FBI, DOD, DHS, you name it—was a complete mystery to her. And that was only the top layer of his legerdemain. Meme was well funded—there wasn’t one thing Morgana had ever asked for that the general had ever refused. They had bleeding-edge technology to the point where all their equipment was upgraded twice a year. Obtaining vast sums of money from Marshall Fulmer, former senator and head of the Joint Armed Services Appropriations Committee (JASAC) who had just been confirmed by Congress as the incoming president’s national security advisor, without letting on what the funds were for, seemed an impossibility. And yet the general managed it.
“Morning, Mac,” she said, as she took another sip of her cappuccino. “What’s up?”
The general was possessed of a wide brow and beetling eyebrows. One could tell a lot from those eyebrows, which were the most mobile aspect of his diamond-shaped face. “It seems our old friend, Boris Illyich Karpov, has climbed out of the grave.”
“General Karpov is dead,” Morgana said. “His throat was slit from ear to ear, in Moscow last year at his wedding.”
“And yet, he keeps bedeviling us.” The general shook his head. “As you are well aware, Boris Karpov trod a fine line between doing the Sovereign’s bidding and working for himself. That is more difficult in Russia than it is anywhere else in the world, save North Korea. It seems that in the months before he was killed, Karpov was working on several clandestine initiatives.”
Morgana’s screen split. MacQuerrie remained in the left half, while the right half was filled with a rain of vertical lines of computer code so complex they took her breath away.
“What in the name of holy hell is that?”
“No idea,” MacQuerrie said. “Which is why I’ve brought it to you.”
“We’ll get right on it.”
“That’s just what you won’t do,” MacQuerrie said. “This is for your eyes only. No one is to see or even catch a whiff that this code exists. Got that?”
“Of course, but what do you think it is?”
The general seemed to age a decade before her eyes. He ran a hand across his face, and to her horror, she noticed a slight tremor in the fingers.
“My best guess: a cyber weapon, something so sophisticated that it’s far beyond anything we’ve seen—or even dreamt of—before. For some time, this thing, this weapon, was a rumor, nothing more. But because some of the stories attributed fantastic powers to it, I kept my ear to the ground, collated even the most outlandish of the rumors.
“And, then, out of the blue, an hour ago, this shard appeared in the wild. My people found it quite by accident while trolling the dark web for intel on a certain arms dealer we’ve been after for years, but have yet to pin a single misstep on, let alone a crime. When leads do surface, the people behind them vanish as if into thin air. We never even find a body.”
“What’s this arms dealer’s name?”
“Keyre. He’s a Somali pirate—or was, anyway, until we took Viktor Bout into custody.” She knew Bout was the most notorious illegal arms dealer of the last decade. “That left a giant hole in the illegal arms trade, and Keyre was first into Bout’s territory, killing off whoever was left from the Russian’s own network, replacing them with his own people.