Juan Gómez-Jurado - Contract with God aka The Moses Expedition

The third call would take place in six and a half minutes’ time.

Albert, for God’s sake, don’t fail me.

NEW YORK

Wednesday, 19 July 2006. 11:45 p.m.

‘How do you think they’ll get in?’ Orville asked.

‘I guess they’ll bring a SWAT team and abseil down from the roof, probably shoot out the glass windows and all that shit.’

‘A SWAT team for a couple of unarmed burglars? Don’t you think that’s like using a tank to go after a couple of mice.’

‘Look at it this way, Orville: two strangers have broken into the private offices of a paranoid multimillionaire. You should be happy they’re not going to drop a bomb on us. Now let me concentrate. To be the only one who has access to this floor, Russell must have a very secure computer.’

‘Don’t tell me that after everything we’ve been through to get here you can’t get into his computer!’

‘I didn’t say that. I’m just saying it will take me at least ten more seconds.’

Albert wiped the sweat from his forehead then let his hands fly over the keyboard. Not even the best hacker in the world can get into a computer if it’s not linked to a server. That had been their problem from the beginning. They had tried everything to locate Russell’s computer within the Kayn network. It was impossible because in terms of systems, the computers on this floor didn’t belong to Kayn Tower. To his surprise, Albert found out that not only Russell but also Kayn used computers that were connected to the Internet and each other using 3G cards, two of the hundreds of thousands that were operating in New York City at the time. Without that crucial bit of information, Albert could have spent decades searching the Internet for two invisible computers.

They must pay more than five hundred dollars a day for their broadband usage not to mention the calls , Albert thought . I suppose that’s nothing when you’re worth millions. Especially when you can keep people like us at bay using such a simple trick .

‘I think I’ve got it,’ said the priest as the screen changed from a black background to the bright blue of the system’s start-up. ‘Any luck finding that disk?’

Orville had gone through the drawers and the only cupboard in Russell’s neat and elegant office, pulling out files and dumping them on the carpet. He was now tugging paintings off the wall in a frenzy, looking for a safe, and slicing through the bottom of chairs with a silver letter opener.

‘Looks like there’s nothing to find,’ Orville said, pushing one of Russell’s chairs over with his foot so that he could sit next to Albert. The bandages on his hands were once again covered in blood and his round face was pale.

‘Paranoid son of a bitch. They only communicated with each other. No external e-mails. Russell must use another computer to run the business.’

‘He must have taken it to Jordan.’

‘I need your help. What do we look for?’

A minute later, after keying in all the passwords he could think of, Orville gave up.

‘It’s useless. There’s nothing. And if there was, he’s already erased it.’

‘That gives me an idea. Wait,’ said Albert, taking from his pocket a USB flash drive no bigger than a stick of chewing gum, and connecting it to the CPU of the computer so that it would interface with the hard drive. ‘The little program in this baby will let you retrieve information from erased sections on the hard drive. We can go from there.’

‘Terrific. Look for Netcatch.’

‘Right!’

With a little buzz, a list of fourteen files appeared in the program’s search window. Albert opened all of them at once.

‘They’re html files. Saved websites.’

‘Do you recognise anything?’

‘Yes, I saved them myself. They’re what I call server conversations. Terrorists never send each other e-mails when they’re planning an attack. Any idiot knows that e-mail can go through twenty or thirty servers before reaching its destination, so you never know who’s watching your communication. What they do is give everyone in the cell the same password to a free account and they write whatever they need to pass on as a draft e-mail message. It’s like you’re writing to yourself except that it’s a whole cell of terrorists communicating with each other. The e-mail is never sent. It never goes anywhere because each one of the terrorists is using the same account and-’

Orville stood paralysed in front of the screen, so stunned that for a moment he forgot to breathe. The unthinkable, what he had never imagined, suddenly became obvious before his very eyes.

‘This isn’t right,’ he said.

‘What is it, Orville?’

‘I… hack through thousands and thousands of accounts every week. When we copy files from a web server, we only keep the text. If we didn’t, the images would quickly fill up our hard drives. The result is ugly, but you can still read it.’

Orville pointed a bandaged finger at the computer screen, where a conversation between terrorists on the e-mail account Maktoob.com could be seen with coloured buttons and images that would not have been the case had this been one of the files he had hacked into and saved.

‘Somebody went into Maktoob.com from the browser in this computer, Albert. Even though they erased it after they finished, the images remained in the memory cache. And to get into Maktoob…’

Albert understood even before Orville could finish.

‘Whoever was here had to know the password.’

Orville agreed.

‘It’s Russell, Albert. Russell is Huqan.’

At that moment shots rang out, shattering the large window.

AL MUDAWWARA DESERT, JORDAN

Thursday, 20 July 2006. 6:49 a.m.

Fowler looked carefully at his watch. Nine seconds ahead of the agreed time, the unexpected happened.

Albert was calling.

The priest had gone to the canyon entrance to make his call. There was a blind spot there that the soldier watching from the southern end of the cliff couldn’t see. The moment he turned on the phone, the call came. Fowler knew straight away that something was wrong.

‘Albert, what’s happened?’

On the other end of the line he heard a number of voices yelling. Fowler tried to understand what was going on.

‘Throw down the phone!’

‘Officer, I have to make this call!’ Albert’s voice sounded far away, as if he didn’t have the phone next to his ear. ‘It’s really important. It’s a question of national security.’

‘I told you to drop the fucking phone.’

‘I’m going to lower my arm slowly and talk. If you see me do something suspicious, then shoot me.’

‘This is my last warning. Drop it!’

‘Anthony,’ Albert’s voice was steady and clear. He’d finally put the earpiece in. ‘Can you hear me?’

‘Yes, Albert.’

‘Russell is Huqan. Confirmed. Be careful-’

The connection was cut off. Fowler felt a wave of shock wash over his body. He turned around to run towards the camp, then everything went black.

Andrea and Harel stopped at the entrance to the mess tent when they saw David Pappas running towards them. Pappas was carrying a bloody T-shirt and he seemed to be disoriented.

‘Doctor, Doctor!’

‘What the hell’s going on, David?’ answered Harel. She had been in the same bad mood ever since the water incident had made proper coffee a thing of the past.

‘It’s the professor. He’s in bad shape.’