Jeff Abbott - Trust Me

‘Do you know what you’re looking for?’ she asked.

‘Not really,’ he said. ‘A gadget that could track you. Like I’m going to recognize that.’ He risked a grin and she smiled, barely, back.

‘Or blow us up. Aren’t I Mary Sunshine?’ Exhaustion cramped her voice.

Luke slid out from under the car. ‘I don’t see anything there that looks totally foreign.’

‘All right.’ They got in; she drove into the dark street.

‘Where to?’

‘Some place we can plan. I need sleep.’ Luke’s fatigue was overwhelming. His body had no adrenaline left. He felt like he had been running forever.

‘Someplace cheap,’ she said.

‘Someplace cheap,’ he agreed.

‘Eric lied about his whole life,’ she said unexpectedly, and tears spilled from her eyes. But not sobs. The tears were steady and controlled and she wiped them off her cheek with the back of her hand. She kept driving and Luke didn’t know what to do until he put his hand over her hand on the steering wheel. Just for comfort.

Neither of them noticed the traffic camera perched on the closest intersection, watching them with its uncaring eye as they pulled away from the curb and drove into the darkness.

Snow slept in the motel bed, exhausted from her mending shoulder and her ill-advised murder. Mouser opened his laptop and took a walk along the Night Road.

He felt lonely much of the time but signing onto the Night Road’s private website was like slipping into a warm bath. Happiness, comfort, knowing you belonged. It was a rare sensation for him.

It was not a single website, but rather a fortress of several linked sites, hosted on a Russian server. The sites appeared innocuous – even boring – until you entered a password, and their delights opened up to your eyes. You could not get a password without being cleared by Henry Shawcross. Very few in the Night Road could name, by true identity, another member. He glanced at Snow; he still didn’t know her real name. It was better that way.

He sighed, with relief and pleasure. He read the fresh postings on the site – encoded in Night Road parlance. Celebrations and congratulations on the oil pipeline explosion in Canada. Disguising it as an accident, a Night Road member had managed to inflict millions in economic damage to both Canada and the United States for the tiny investment of five thousand dollars for plastique and transportation costs. Electronic versions of high fives floated in the postings. The E. coli meat poisoning scare from the Tennessee food plant was also mentioned as a triumph, the combined work of two members who hadn’t known each other before being introduced via the Night Road and had pooled resources and knowledge to infect the processing plant and send a wave of panic across American tables. Low cost, high impact.

A select few, proven the most capable, would take part in Hellfire.

He moved past the accolades. Someone in Alabama wanted training in explosives and wanted a new source for firearms. A man in Los Angeles was looking for other groups to network with to disrupt highway traffic on the 4th of July. Another poster in Belgium had lifted a large number of credit card account numbers from a US Army depot and was selling them.

Mouser paused at one posting – a British hacker had dispersed a Trojan horse via a porn site out of St Petersburg and the Trojan had begun a rapid propagation around the world; the hacker announced he was ensnaring a thousand unsuspecting PCs a day. The Trojan malware would serve up all passwords and credit card information stored on the infected computers. Blocks of one hundred systems were available for sale; bidding was intensifying.

Mouser considered. He’d funded his last three operations against the Beast – ammunition, travel and lodging – by buying a block of infected systems. It was like buying a mutual fund; some hijacked systems could deliver hugely profitable information; others – usually owned by teenage boys – would produce slim to none. But nice clean identity and account information was valuable – and, given how badly the past couple of days had gone, he and Snow might need clean names to step into, for a short while. Until the dust settled. And if the payments he’d been promised fell through, then he could use the financial info to resell down the chain. He knew of Serbian crime rings and one ever-desperate Muslim terror cell in France who would buy nearly anything.

Mouser put in a bid on two blocks of machines and then posted his own request.

Need access to Creeps full-blowns for P24. Only 2. 1 GPS.

In Night Road parlance, he was asking for access to all credit card databases for charges paid in the past twenty-four hours, for two names, and GPS information for one car – Aubrey’s. He waited.

Five minutes later, a voice elsewhere in the world replied:

Might can do. Offer?

Mouser responded: Can trade skills in US.

‘Skills’ was a code word for kills – he was offering to kill someone in exchange for the data he needed.

The reply: Not in US. Sorry. Good luck.

Then another offer appeared: I can help. Post details at skeech@netter. net

This email address was an established blind – clicking on it took you to a legitimate computer website, a discussion group for American movies and TV shows owned by one of the same holding companies that owned Travport Air Cargo. The discussion group was in Malaysia, and the postings ranged from fluent English to Malay to badly broken English – perfect for shorthand cues. The site was again hosted out of Russia and when needed, postings by Night Road members were automatically purged from the system. It was not perfect anonymity but it was close.

He slipped into the forum, created a new user ID, and signed on. He posted a new topic, asking in broken English about an upcoming DVD release with the word skills in it. A moment later another poster responded with a long answer written in a motley, text-message style shorthand.

They chatted, continuing the camouflaged dance, until the respondent gave an encoded answer that contained a phone number with an area code in New Mexico.

Mouser called the number.

It was answered on the third ring. ‘I’m your new friend,’ Mouser said.

‘I can get your information.’ The voice was baritone, Spanish-flecked, tobacco-hoarse. ‘But it will take a few hours.’

‘I need it now.’

‘Your need is irrelevant. It will still take a few hours.’

Mouser sighed. ‘And you can guarantee continuous reading of the car’s location.’

‘Until my path into the database is discovered. No guarantees. But you should get a solid read on where your target is.’

‘Who do you want handled as payment?’

‘You take out a cop and we’re square.’

‘You mean just any cop at random?’

Mouser considered. Police officers were servants of the Beast. It was strangely thrilling to know a police officer was going about life, unaware that he or she would soon die so Mouser could buy information. ‘All right.’

‘What’s your car registrant’s name?’

‘Aubrey Perrault. She drives a Volvo, license plate F52-TJR, Illinois. Tonight she would have been parked in Lincoln Park, off Armitage.’

‘I have a friend who has a back door into most of the major metropolitan traffic camera feeds. I can see if she’s popped up anywhere in Chicago in the past few hours – it would help narrow the search – and contact you via the site.’ They would not use these phones again with each other; they were prepaids, to be destroyed and disposed of when their business concluded.

Mouser thanked him and clicked off the phone. He signed off the Malaysian site and returned to the Night Road site. So many people, each with their own agenda, their own skills, their own cause, trading their brilliance and their resources, ready to strike against the far wider world. An army, hidden in the shadows, and waging a war that would change the world. A Night Road, built by Henry Shawcross out of the bricks given to him by Luke Dantry. A scary, and a beautiful, creature, a beast of justice, was being born.