Wormhole (The Rho Agenda #3)(94)

Eileen’s problem was that she couldn’t quit. It wasn’t in her nature. It was the reason she’d gotten her doctorate from Caltech when others her age were having sweet sixteen parties.

She’d finished her detailed analysis of the data recorded coming and going from the Gregory USB dongles. The things had provided a listing of every programmable system within a one-kilometer radius. But the information went well beyond anything a hacker could obtain, even with a physical connection to those systems. Somehow the dongles had managed to provide the exact location of every system, down to the nearest millimeter. It was an impossible level of detail, and while Eileen couldn’t yet confirm that degree of accuracy, she’d checked coordinates of several samples. They certainly had sub-meter precision.

Even if she assumed the USB dongles had some unknown and undetectable Wi-Fi signal that could connect to other systems, the location thing stumped her. How? It was as if some sort of futuristic neutrino scan had detected all those systems and recorded their locations before tapping them for information. If technology like that existed, it had to be Rho Project–related.

That led Eileen to perform her own review of the events that had led Admiral Riles to launch Jack Gregory at Los Alamos. If Gregory had stumbled upon it during his investigation, he would have realized certain governments would pay for that kind of technology. Perhaps something on that path held a clue to how those things worked.

It was a path that led her to make use of Big John’s correlative search capabilities. Eileen wasn’t worried about attaining authorization for her initial search. It fell within the span of her forensic examination of the hack that Gregory’s team had pulled off. But with every query, Big John led her farther astray, quickly invalidating her working hypothesis. Worse, she found herself seduced by the quest, her “How?” changed to “Why?”

From what she’d learned, it was clear that Eileen wasn’t the first to snoop this trail. Denise Jennings’s digital fingerprints were everywhere she looked. But Denise’s chain of Big John queries had suddenly ceased. Apparently that train of discovery had finally frightened Denise too badly to continue.

As Eileen looked at the evidence before her, she couldn’t help envy Denise’s good judgment. But now that she’d seen the rabbit disappear down this hole, Eileen had no choice but to follow.





Siena’s Piazza del Campo was almost empty. A few tourists stood atop the fish-bone patterned red bricks, peering over the wrought-iron fence in front of the Gaia Fountain, snapping pictures, applying suntan lotion to pasty white legs, or texting friends who had wandered off to see the Siena Cathedral or one of the medieval Tuscan city’s other tourist destinations.

Heather, as Inga Hedstrom, had been with the Swiss private security firm Paladin for three weeks. Her current assignment involved babysitting Bayad al’Fahd, the yuppie son of a Saudi prince, on his upper Tuscany tour. Not that Bayad didn’t have his own bodyguards. He had a half dozen of them. But young al’Fahd was an important new client of Credit Suisse and the second largest Swiss bank had extended the extra protection as a courtesy. Thus Heather found herself the upper-class equivalent of a new account microwave oven.

Getting hired by Paladin had been the easy part. Inga Hedstrom, a dual US and Swiss citizen, was twenty-nine and 120 pounds, and stood five feet eight inches tall. With her boyishly short blonde hair and blue eyes, only her icy demeanor kept her from being attractive. Jack had created an elaborate black ops profile, including a lot of dead former colleagues who raved about her work in postmortem write-ups. With the ability to infiltrate all the appropriate record systems, she’d had no difficulty ensuring her security clearance and records appeared in all the right places. And since she had left CIA employ six months ago and all her CIA missions were classified and close-hold, they avoided broad scrutiny.

Heather liked being Inga, but she didn’t particularly like this assignment. Once it became clear that she had no interest in doing anything other than her job, Bayad had told her to stay away from his inner circle. Assuming she didn’t know more than cursory Arabic, he had begun laughing it up with two of his biggest bodyguards. Wasn’t it funny that the Swiss bank actually thought this woman could enhance his protection, when all she was fit to enhance was his harem?

On the upside, not being allowed within his inner circle meant she didn’t have to listen to the moron’s views on women, or anything else for that matter. On the downside, she was too far away from Bayad to prevent the attack when it came.

She trailed ten meters behind Bayad’s pack as they approached the string of outdoor eateries lining the piazza’s northwest side. Along the dining area’s right side, two men busily unloaded chairs from the rear of a white van, much to the irate restaurant manager’s dismay. A vision flashed through her brain a second before the vehicle began to move, its wheels laying a thin layer of smoking rubber toward Bayad.

As Heather sprinted forward, pulling the Glock from her shoulder holster, the two chair stackers wheeled, pointing previously concealed MP5 submachine guns toward the group of surprised Saudis. Heather’s first bullet caught the nearest man in the chest, the nine-millimeter Parabellum sending him tumbling onto an adjacent table. But a woman carrying a child blocked her line of fire to the second assassin, enabling him to unleash a fusillade of automatic weapon fire into Bayad’s clustered bodyguards. Heather’s second round struck just above the bridge of his nose, its mist trail giving him a momentary red halo as he fell.