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“Four and a half months. And you’ve been in every hour of our lives since.”
Andy looked up from the phone. “I heard Darius telling you she was trouble. I thought he said that because she wouldn’t sleep with him.”
“Matthew, Ian, you’ve got to listen to me. It’s not my phone. Even though there were deaths tonight at the refinery, it will be offline for weeks, and the world will listen to you, Matthew, finally listen. And look what Andy did—he took down the big oil company systems. We’ll have them under our thumbs by morning. You know I feel the same way as you about how our president is cozying up to the Iranians and all those other Middle East terrorists, you know I do.”
Ian said to Andy, his voice and his eyes dead cold, “Take the phone apart.”
Andy plugged it into his computer and tapped on the keyboard. There was stark silence in the living room except for the sounds of the keys and Matthew’s heaving breathing.
Andy called over his shoulder, “The outgoing texts are automatically deleted, very nice custom program to do that. There’s a single number in the memory, though it’s deleted from the phone itself, too. The number’s been called three times in the past two weeks, but the calls go different places.” He looked at Vanessa. “Who are you talking to? Who’s on the other side of the call?”
“Can you reverse the number?” Matthew asked, never taking his eyes off her, his gun now steady on her chest. Center mass: she’d be dead in less than a heartbeat if he pulled the trigger.
“Yeah.” More tapping. “The number’s cloaked, it bounces off four satellites before it goes through. Phone’s encrypted, Matthew.”
His voice—so soft, so deadly calm. “Where’d you get an encrypted phone, Vanessa?”
She said again, “It’s not mine.”
Matthew kept his eyes on her face. “I know, it belongs to Ian, it belongs to Andy. Could it belong to me as well?”
“Maybe it belongs to Darius, and he’s manipulating you yet again. Maybe he isn’t who you believe he is.”
“Darius? Now, that’s a thought.” He said to Andy, “Call the number, Andy.”
15
PAWN TO E4
26 Federal Plaza
New York, New York
As Nicholas drove the Crown Vic into Manhattan, he could still see the plume of fire from the refinery in his rearview, could still taste the burning oil in his mouth. It was hard to get his brain around all that had happened in such a short time. COE had murdered three FBI agents and Richard Hodges, blown up Bayway, not caring how many people died. And now, the launching of a coordinated attack on the oil companies themselves. He saw Mr. Hodges’s face, the perfect circle in his forehead. He’d been a hero, he’d given them Larry Reeves, a man Nicholas was certain was as dead as all the other workers at Bayway.
The whole case had changed in an instant.
What was COE all about now? Certainly it was now about much more than simply wanting Middle Eastern oil to stop being imported.
He parked the Crown Vic in the nearly empty underground garage at Federal Plaza, knowing the moment word was out on the shootings, the place would come alive.
Gray, as usual, looked the mad-genius part—slightly disheveled, clothes wrinkled, hair sticking up, black circles under his eyes. He was a comforting sight and had rapidly become one of Nicholas’s most trusted allies. They understood each other.
Gray threw his hands up when he saw Nicholas, didn’t mention the condition he was in—black face, burned hands, no sleeves on his shirt, ripped and bloody pants. No time, no time. “This is bad, Nicholas. Someone sent a Trojan horse into the oil companies’ e-mail systems. A simple e-mail, designed to look internal, sent to every e-mail address on the corporate rolls, supposedly from the heads of the company themselves. And inside was a nasty worm.
“One of the staff members at ConocoPhillips opened the e-mail from home, thinking it was a note from his boss. It took control of the server from there, unspooled into the system, started wiping hard drives, and no one has been able to get back in. Their Web folks are freaking out. They called us in a panic. I’ve been working on it since. So far, I can’t crack it. It’s working like a distributed denial-of-service attack, but the attackers have put in their own firewalls. So not only can I not get in, I can’t track what they’re doing while they’re inside. All it took was one click. One damn click. The odds were in their favor.”
Nicholas’s brain sparked. “Are we dealing with a DDoS, stopping outsiders from accessing the company websites, or are they taking remote control of the facilities?”
“I don’t know. I can’t get in far enough to tell what they’re up to.”
“If their goal was to blow our infrastructure, this was a good way to go about it. Is it COE who launched the attack? Have they claimed responsibility?”
“They didn’t have to; their COE logo is front and center on the screen.” Gray clicked his mouse a few times and the screen in front of him turned white. In the middle floated a stylish monogram with elegant, ornate letters——atop a rotating chessboard.
Nicholas said, “We have to get in. The worm could be downloading information as well as wiping the memory off the servers. If so, they’ll have access to everything from internal e-mails to finances.”
“Not to mention they can turn the power off to any of the physical locations at will. So much is run by computers today—they could tell the pumps to stop working, and boom. You don’t need a bomb to stop oil production in its tracks.” He hit two more keys. “Look at this.”
