Robert Ludlum's (TM) The Bourne Initiative (Jason Bourne series)(67)

It was a bit of code, but totally unrelated to the one she was working to decipher. At first, it appeared to be a dangling bit of code, but a few minutes of concentrated effort on her part revealed that it was only disguised as such. It was, in fact, a message—or part of one, the fourth part, if she was right and the three previous flickers were from the same source.

After so much time frustrated at not getting anywhere with the Bourne Initiative, she had begun to doubt her abilities. But her furious and brilliant work now in punching through the exceedingly clever electronic disguise renewed her faith in the abilities Mac called extraordinary.

She set about decoding the cipher. The first thing she discovered was that it had an authenticating marker. That meant the message was sent either by a large international conglomerate or a state-sponsored agency. But why had it come here into Larry’s office space? It wasn’t meant for her. In fact, she would never have seen it had she been working as usual; instead, she’d been on a local screen, trying and failing once again to put her malformed pieces of code into a coherent whole. If the message wasn’t for her, then it must be for Larry.

There was a moment, brief though it was, of thinking she should just forget about the whole thing. If it was for Larry, which seemed more and more likely, she had no business reading it. But then that authenticating marker stuck in the corner of her eye, as the flicker had before, and she thought, I won’t read the message; I’ll just take a peek at who sent it. She shrugged. It was most likely from Global Photographics, the organization he freelanced for. But then why had it come in from the dark web; that made no sense.

So she copied the marker, sent it out into the dark web. What came back was this: Unit 309. What the hell was Unit 309? She’d never heard of it. She latched on to the site that had ID’d the marker, which led her to another site, and another, and still another, until she was deeper into the dark web than she’d ever been before—so deep that she began to feel uncomfortable. She’d heard stories of the very bad entities winging their way through this section of cyberspace.

Her line of inquiry at last dumped her onto a site selling all manner of armament—not simply handguns, semiautomatics, and the like. Those were a dime a dozen out here on the cyber frontier. No, this site was delighted to sell you missiles, flame-throwers, guided rocket launchers, tanks, smart bombs—the list went on and on.

And then her screen blacked out for an instant, to be replaced by an overlay that blared in large lettering: PLEASE ENTER YOUR AUTHENTICATION CODE in seven different languages. She didn’t have one, so she backed out. Or at least tried to. Something had hold of her—a worm algorithm that was trying to find out her identity. It was a very fast worm, and if she hadn’t installed firewalls that she had created that went beyond military grade she would have been a dead duck.

As it was, she was having difficulty staying ahead of the worm. As she worked rapidly and methodically she realized that she had encountered this very worm before while she had headed Meme LLC, and her blood ran cold. It was a Russian military worm, which, now that she had ID’d it definitively, she shut down in short order.

It took her less than ten seconds to remove herself from the dark web entirely. She was sweating through her shirt and her scalp itched. Her heart rate was elevated and her hands trembled slightly.

Unit 309 was an organ of the Russian state. Now that she knew that, she knew where to search to ID it. Less than a minute later, she had her answer: Unit 309 was a cyber-infiltration cadre under the command of spetsnaz, a division of the FSB, the state security agency.

Her mind had just registered this terrifying fact when Larry London waltzed through the door with their lunch.

“Guess what,” he said jovially. “I brought you a cheeseburger and fries.” He set the paper parcels on the table. “A nice little bit of home.”

Only his name wasn’t Larry London, he didn’t just freelance for Global Photographics, and he was no undercover operative of the CIA. Of these things Morgana was now sure. Larry London was a Russian spy, and she had been aiding and abetting him.

Pushing her chair back, she excused herself, hurried down the hall to the ladies’ room, where she vomited up the remains of her breakfast, which now seemed as tainted as if it had been a vile combination of a glass of vodka and a bowl of borscht.

—



“I found him near the edge of my property,” Arthur Lee said.

The three guards who had stopped him at the front entrance to Crowcroft were dressed in jeans and checkered shirts. They wore Timberland ankle boots and matching gabardine jackets, which, if Lee didn’t know it already, would have given them away as feds. He thought they were morons. Dangerous morons, to be sure, but morons all the same.

“Where?” one of the NSA guards said, peering suspiciously into the interior of Lee’s vehicle as if they hadn’t all seen him every day for the last three years. The guard was built like a heavyweight boxer.

Lee indicated with his head. “Trunk.”

While the lanky guard checked the underside of his vehicle with a mirror at the end of a three-foot handle, the bald guard drew his service weapon, opened the trunk.

“He’s not tied up,” Baldy said, and Boxer, leaning in Lee’s window, repeated the statement as if, he, Lee, were the moron.

“He’s hurt,” Lee said, keeping it smooth and servile the way they liked it. “Hurt bad.”