Robert Ludlum's (TM) The Bourne Initiative (Jason Bourne series)(4)

“Keyre has proven himself to be smarter, better connected, and far more slippery than Bout ever was. The story goes that his network is larger, more far-flung, and, most crucially, contains contacts inside governments worldwide. Bout had customs and immigration people in a dozen countries in his pocket. By contrast, Keyre’s network makes Bout’s look like a kindergarten class.

“Whether that’s the emmis, I don’t yet know, but it’s this cyber weapon that’s giving me a migraine for the ages. You need to make sense of the fragment and you have to find the rest of the code.”

Morgana sat back, absorbing the information Mac was throwing her way. Something was nagging at her, and she voiced it: “Mac, have you thought about why this fragment suddenly showed up on the dark web?”

“What d’you mean? There are any number of ways—”

“No, there aren’t. Not something of this level of sophistication. No, Mac, my guess is that it was released on the dark web deliberately.”

“But what for?”

“I think it’s a strong possibility that whoever took possession of the cyber initiative following Karpov’s murder is putting it up for auction.”

“Auction?”

“What better way to whet potential buyers’ appetites, and drive up the bids, than to let them take a peek behind the curtain, so to speak.”

“Christ, I hadn’t thought of that.” MacQuerrie was sweating now, droplets forming at his hairline, rolling down the sides of his cheek.

“Could this Keyre be running the auction?”

“Possible. Even likely. Somalia is just the place for such things.” The general frowned. “But I’m thinking he’s only the conduit. Someone else is the mastermind. And knowing Karpov as I did, it would have to be someone he trusted implicitly as well as explicitly.”

“That rules out just about everyone in the Russian government, doesn’t it?”

MacQuerrie nodded. “Yes, it does.”

“Someone from within the initiative itself, then.”

“Again, knowing Karpov, he wouldn’t trust anyone like that with the big picture. His operations were meticulously compartmentalized. That was his first rule of keeping his work absolutely secure. No one could betray him if they didn’t know what was really going on.”

“In that case, I’m willing to bet several people wrote this code, each one unaware of what the others were doing. Could Karpov himself have stitched all the pieces of code together?”

“The general was a man of many talents,” MacQuerrie said. “It’s possible, I suppose, but, frankly, not very likely.”

“Well, no programmer could direct Karpov’s initiative as a whole. The best ones are like idiot savants: they know their stuff backward and forward, but that’s all they’re good for. They couldn’t direct themselves out of a paper bag.” She pursed her lips. “So again, I have to ask, who is running the operation now?”

MacQuerrie did not answer right away. It seemed to Morgana that now they had come to the nub of the matter, his face had gone even grayer. Perhaps it was the lighting in his office, but she doubted that. His right eyebrow twitched, which meant he was under extreme stress. What could cause such a thing? she asked herself.

“One thing before we go any further, Morgana.”

She said nothing. Even for her, who was more or less inured to such things, waiting for the second shoe to drop was a mighty unpleasant experience. This was General Arthur MacQuerrie, not some fatuous NSA type who didn’t know his ass from his elbow.

“I have no doubt that Karpov’s operation is aimed squarely at the United States.” He paused to wipe at a growing film of sweat on his upper lip. “It could be the national electrical grid or even, God forbid, the president’s bank of nuclear missile codes.”

“What? But that’s impossible. The code data is buried so deeply behind a phalanx of firewalls…and then the codes are changed hourly.”

“All true. But Karpov’s operational language is so obscure, so utterly unknown, I and my people believe the nuclear codes are its target.”

“If the Russians access our nuclear codes…”

“You see the nature of the extreme danger we’re in.”

Morgana stared at the lines of code, cascading down her screen. Good God, she thought. What we have here is the ultimate weapon of mass destruction.

Black Star. No wonder.

“This is a superworm,” she said. “A form of malware no one’s ever encountered before.”

“Tell me something I don’t know. This is catastrophic. You had better come up with the answer, stat.”

Morgana didn’t like the tone that had set into his voice. This had happened more than once before, when Mac started treating her like a low-level gopher, his voice hard and threatening. She bit her lip, but bile built up in her stomach, churning, as if a whirlpool had opened up inside her.

“Horrifyingly, there’s more,” Mac was saying.

She tensed even more as the code vanished, to be replaced by a grainy black-and-white photo, obviously taken with a telephoto lens. A surveillance shot, then. Men in tuxedos, women in fancy floor-length gowns, jewels and beading glittering. Over their heads an ornate crystal chandelier, spilling light down on them.