Cindy Dees: Target

She highlighted the intruder’s code, then cut and pasted it to a new file. She’d have to show it around. See if any of her cyber pals recognized the work. In the meantime, it was wicked late and tomorrow was a big day. January 20. Inauguration day for her favorite poster boy.

She climbed into bed wearily and reached for the lamp beside her bed. “G’night Gorgeous,” she mumbled at the wall of pictures of Monihan.

She closed her eyes gratefully and let her mind drift toward sleep.

She was just on the verge of slipping into unconsciousness when a sound jolted her rudely to full awareness. An insistent electronic chirping. Now what? Surely she didn’t have an alarm clock set somewhere in the house for this insane hour. Reluctantly, she sat up in bed. If it was a smoke detector in need of a battery, she was going to rip the damned thing right off the ceiling.

She padded out into the living room and stopped cold at her fully lit computer screen and the bold announcement across it in large letters that she had an incoming e-mail. When in the Sam Hill had her Internet server started announcing incoming messages like this? She was bloody well turning the new feature off this instant. Irate, she sat down at her computer and pulled up her Internet server. She went to the mail screen and gaped at the address of the e-mail’s sender. Delphi@oracle.org.

Holy…freaking…cow.

Oracle? To her home address?

And Delphi? Personally?

An involuntary shiver passed through her. Oracle. An idea. A database. A secret organization. Her secondary employer and the tool of a shadowy figure known to her only as Delphi.

She’d been recruited for her ultrasecret work for Oracle and Delphi straight out of her army intelligence training. Although, she always suspected it was more her attendance at the ultraexclusive Athena Academy for the Advancement of Women than her position in the government that earned her the nod from Oracle. Her first mission for Delphi had been to plant the Oracle computer program in the army’s vast computer network, where it collected data on everything from crop patterns in Africa to political unrest in Europe, terrorism threats to DOD research programs, and anything else that might prove useful to Delphi.

She didn’t know if Delphi was male or female, a person or a computer program, or maybe just another layer of protection shrouding in mystery the identity of the person or persons behind Oracle. At any rate, Delphi took inputs from a wide variety of government and nongovernment sources and analyzed the staggering mass of information, combing through it all for hints of possible threats to the United States. The ultimate conspiracy theorist, as it were.

And tonight, Delphi had something to tell her.

Since when had her secret employer started contacting its agents personally in the middle of the night? Not that she ever had any contact with other Oracle agents to compare notes, but it certainly had never happened to her before. Hastily, she opened the e-mail from the mysterious Delphi.

Have been working on the database and it came up with a rather alarming bit of information. Could you please look into it immediately?-D

Attached was a reference number for the particular analysis Delphi wanted her to check out.

She assumed “immediately” meant this very second. What in the world could be so urgent? Thoroughly alarmed now, Diana accessed Oracle’s database, or at least the superficial levels of it available over the Internet, and plugged in the reference number. She waited, tense, while the system retrieved the analysis in question. Most of the assessments the Oracle database had fed her recently were bogus, and her repeated proposals of these eventually unfounded threats to her superiors had earned her a host of rumors that she’d lost her edge completely. But this one…Straight from Delphi? Did she dare believe it, if this “bit of information” turned out to be yet another wildly off-the-wall speculation?

The threat analysis popped up onto the screen. She scrolled down through the lengthy write-up to the end where the thumbnail summary of the problem was traditionally placed. Tonight, this section was surprisingly short. She scanned the words quickly. And lurched upright in her seat at the report’s terse conclusion.

A person or persons will attempt to assassinate President-elect Gabriel Monihan within the next twenty-four hours. You must stop them.

A rather alarming bit of information, indeed! Urgently, she paged through the rest of the report, scanning the facts and assumptions the massive Oracle database used to arrive at its conclusion. Of course, large sections of the analysis were not transmitted to her here. They were deemed too sensitive to transit the Internet where they risked being intercepted. If she wanted to read the full text, she’d have to go down to the Oracle office and do it in person. But, at a glance, the logic looked sound. Not that she seriously expected anything else. Despite its recent flubs, the program was a masterpiece of computer software engineering.

She grabbed her black leather duster, a nearly ankle-length coat that billowed menacingly when she strode along a windy street. It made her feel like a gunslinger straight out of the Wild West. Plus, it had great pockets that stored a host of doodads and gadgets. Heck, it could swallow up an automatic rifle if it had to. Not that a desk jockey like her needed that feature often, of course. The coat also helped her blend into the gothic subculture of hackers and society dropouts from whom she got some of her best intelligence tips. Best of all, it drove her ultraconservative boss at the Defense Intelligence Agency crazy. And that was all the reason she needed to wear it.

She climbed into her sporty German coupe and backed out of the driveway. She steered down the winding, tree-lined streets of Bethesda, Maryland southward toward Alexandria, Virginia and its Old Town neighborhood where Oracle made its home.

Rock Creek Parkway and the gorgeous park it wound through was deserted at this time of morning with only a few delivery trucks and graveyard shifters on the road. And that was probably why she spotted the piece-of-shit sedan tailing her about a quarter-mile back. She’d lay odds it was Army Intel. The driver’s movements were so precisely according to the Army training manual that it couldn’t possibly be anyone else back there. Besides, no self-respecting FBI agent would be caught dead in a gutless heap like that. And surely the intruder from her house wasn’t so brash that he’d follow her this soon after his getaway. He’d been worried about getting caught. No way would he expose himself openly again. Especially if her hunch about his identity was correct.

She could weed out anybody else by process of elimination. She had no other major investigations open. Every thug she’d helped catch in recent memory was safely behind bars. The other conspiracy theories she was developing at the moment involved political or economic forces that had no human face. But, she’d spent the last three months on the Internet day and night, slowly worming herself inside a terrorist organization known as the Q-Rajn, or Q-group. After that bunch had nearly killed her Athena Academy classmate and NSA code-breaker pal, Kim Valenti, she’d been put on the trail of the Q-group as well. Kim had cracked a code the terrorists were using and foiled a suicide bombing the group was planning in Chicago, but was nearly killed herself in the process. Immediately after the incident, Delphi had assigned Diana to take over the hunt for Q-group and search for any possible reason the terrorists might want to kill Gabe Monihan. Personally, she thought the link between the Q-group and Monihan was tenuous at best. Until tonight. Now, all bets were off. And despite recent busts of local Q-group headquarters in several states, they were still capable of mounting a break-in at her house. And they were certainly capable of trying to kill the President-elect of the United States.