The Second Ship (The Rho Agenda #1)(54)
His glance swept up her body, catching her laughing eyes with his own.
“Same old Jack, I see.”
“Just scoping out my surroundings.” Jack grinned, slammed the door, and brought the engine roaring to life. “We’re supposed to be married, you know.”
“Then you may want to tone down the heat in that gaze of yours. That’s more of a mistress look you have going on.”
“They never said we had to play an old married couple, now did they?”
As he pulled out onto Interstate 25 headed north, Jack glanced back to see Harold following some distance back, the big, white Ford F250 pickup clearly visible.
“How’s Bubba doing back there?” Janet asked.
“It looks like he’s enjoying his ride.”
“He’d like it more if he could get back out on some of these ranch roads. He’s probably having flashbacks to his childhood days out in Arizona. What’s the name of that little town he came from?”
“Show Low. It sits up in the high country above the Mogollon Rim. Pretty place.”
“Thanks, but I’ll stick to New York and leave the backcountry to you hillbillies.”
Janet smiled at the thought. Jack Gregory looked about as much like a country boy as James Bond, comfortable in either a tuxedo or jeans and a brown, leather bomber jacket, equally elegant in either. No. The man was silk and leather, a shot of James Bond with a spritz of Carlos the Jackal blended into one lethal martini, never shaken or stirred.
“What did you find out from the Old Man?” Janet asked.
“They still don’t know where the virus originated, although they’re pretty sure it wasn’t Moscow.”
“So the router tables had been modified?”
“Sometime between the night shift and the end of the trace. Kurtz’s people checked against the nightly backups and several of them didn’t match, although the differences were quite subtle.”
“How was it done?”
“That’s the tricky part. You know those little agent programs that Kurtz thought were just doing a little encryption of random data?”
“Right,” Janet said.
“It turns out that they were posting a periodic health and status code up onto several public web sites. Someone snooping those codes could tell when the agents quit reporting and get a map of how our trace was coming. They apparently launched a cleanup virus as we closed in.”
“But can’t our people find out who was checking the codes on the web sites?”
Jack laughed. “That’s the funniest part yet. They picked out a selection of movie star fan sites. You know. The ones with pictures and juicy gossip. Anyway, the little agent programs were changing little bits here and there in the images, so small it wasn’t noticeable to the viewers.”
“Buried in the hits.”
“You’ve got it. Those sites get millions of daily hits. Determining who was downloading the pictures for the data instead of for their viewing pleasure is impossible.”
“So why are we headed to Los Alamos?”
“Two reasons. Kurtz decoded the message from the computer we heisted. It makes some pretty wild claims about Dr. Donald Stephenson and the Rho Project.”
“So Riles wants us to snoop into the Rho Project? He must be desperate. You go to prison for spying on a deep black operation when you don’t have need to know. Did the president approve this operation?”
“We work for Riles. It’s his ass on the line.”
“What’s the second reason?”
“The decoded message was loaded with inside information from the Rho Project.”
“So we have a mole in the project leaking out damaging information on his boss?”
“A very brilliant mole. Probably a mathematician, based upon the incredible encryption algorithms used. It’s not an intelligence operative, that’s for sure. They made too many mistakes in the way they tried to hide the trail in Moscow. This is an amateur playing at the spy game.”
Janet nodded. “So we take out the amateur, find out what he knows, and then decide how deeply to dig into the Rho Ship.”
“We’ll work both sides at once. I want you to focus on finding our mole. Harold and I will take a little look into the Rho Project and see what turns up.”
A smile of anticipation lifted the corners of Janet Price’s beautiful mouth. “I’ve never liked rodents. Snuffing this one should be entertaining.”
“Get the information first.”
A needle-thin ice pick glittered in Janet’s hand as she grabbed her hair and gave it a couple of quick twists before shoving the pointed weapon through it, firmly securing her long brown locks in a tight bun atop her head.
“Of course.”
A large green sign slid toward them along the right side of the highway.
Santa Fe, six miles.
Good. Best to get a hotel room for the night. No use letting deadly little Janet’s sudden hunger go to waste.
Chapter 37
“I hate to state the obvious,” Mark said, “but three people having exactly the same dream isn’t normal.”
The three were camped out in the Smythe living room, taking advantage of the privacy afforded by the twins’ parent’s absence.