Jeff Abbott - Panic

Mitchell shook his head. ‘No.’

‘I told Dezz, as soon as he was old enough to understand. We get to work together. It’s very nice to work with your son.’

‘I wanted a different life for Evan. The way you wanted a different life for all of us.’

‘I applaud the sentiment, but it’s misplaced. You didn’t trust him, so you put him in greater danger, made it more likely he could be used by our enemies.’ Jargo stirred his own coffee. ‘You seemed to win his trust back, at least to a degree.’

‘I did,’ Mitchell said in a hard voice. ‘You don’t need to doubt him. Your tape convinced him. He’s got a false ID, he’s got cash, he can get back here.’

‘It bothers me he wouldn’t let us come fetch him. Bothers me a lot. This could be a CIA trap.’

‘Your contacts would tell you if he’d been found.’

‘I hope.’ Jargo sipped at the coffee, watched Mitchell. ‘He seemed to soften toward you, but I’m not convinced.’

‘I can persuade my son our best interests are his best interests. You trust me, don’t you?’

‘Of course I do.’ And behind the frown of family concern, Jargo allowed himself a regretful smile. What was the opening line of Anna Karenina? Bast had given Jargo a copy of the book a week before Jargo had killed him. The line was arch nonsense about every unhappy family was unhappy in its own way. The Jargos and the Cashers, he decided, were truly unique in their misery.

He left Mitchell alone in his room and went downstairs to the lodge kitchen. He wanted quiet in which to think.

The boy might be lying about having Khan’s laptop, but Jargo decided he wasn’t. He wanted his father back too badly. He wondered if Dezz would fight so hard for him. He thought not. That was good, because to fight for what could not be won was stupid.

And he loathed stupidity. He’d lightened the world’s burden of two idiots today. Khan had gotten too lazy, too complacent, too self-important. Losing him, losing Pettigrew as a client, were setbacks but not a crippling loss. He could let Galadriel take over Khan’s duties; her loyalty was unquestioned, and she had no bitter offspring to get underfoot, no ego cultivated in boardrooms. Pettigrew had been slow to pay for a hit on a senior CIA official in Moscow whom he personally disliked, and whose job he coveted. Thank God Khan had no involvement with Jargo’s American properties; otherwise staying here at the lodge, under the empty black skies, would have been too risky.

Jargo poured a fresh cup of coffee, studied its steam. The boy couldn’t crack the laptop; at least Khan had done one thing right. And Mitchell had, if words were to be believed, snared his own child into a death trap.

He would have a Deep operative do the hit on Evan, after he had delivered the client list and Khan’s laptop. Without killing Mitchell, of course: from a distance, with a high-powered sniper’s rifle. He suspected Mitchell would want to talk to the boy alone. An attack staged on father and son, he decided, and poor Evan just stepped the wrong way and put his brains in a bullet’s path. He liked the approach because it would stoke Mitchell’s fury, make him easier to manipulate. Evan dead, Donna dead, that grief could make Mitchell even more productive in the years to come.

But he had to prepare for every eventuality, act as though meeting Evan was a CIA trap, and seal every exit. He picked up a cell phone, made a call.

Jargo then crushed a sedative into a glass of orange juice to keep Mitchell calm and took the doped drink back upstairs. He had a long night ahead of him.

R azur was thin, like his sharp-edged namesake. He wore a goatee dyed platinum blond and black eye-glasses and a Celtic cross tattooed on the back of his neck. ‘Evan?’

‘Yes. Razur?’

Razur shook hands with him and sat down at Evan’s table, in the far back corner of the cafe. He tilted his head at Evan. ‘Your eyes look like you just smoked yourself a big chronic.’

‘Chronic?’

‘A potent joint, mate.’

‘Oh.’ Evan shook his head. ‘No. You want a coffee?’

‘Yeah, black. Largest they got.’

The cafe was grimy and funky, but not too busy, a line of computers on one side of the metallic wall, young people Web-surfing while downing juices, teas, and coffees. Evan got up and ordered the drink from the barista. He sensed Razur’s gaze on him the whole time. Evaluating him as a series of problems to be broken down into his constituent parts and solved. Or maybe revisiting the marijuana theory and deciding Evan’s request was the result of reefer madness. Evan came back to the corner table and set a steaming cup in front of Razur.

The hacker took a cautious sip. ‘I’m told you’re being raked over by nasty people.’

‘The less you know the better.’ Evan didn’t want to get into the details of the Deeps or their entanglement with the CIA.

Razur gave a thin smile. ‘But you’ve gotten their dirty secrets.’

‘Yes. On a laptop. But I can’t get past the password.’

‘I won’t either,’ Razur said. ‘Without the cash.’

Evan handed him a laundry bag from the hotel. Razur peeked inside at the money.

‘Count it if you want.’

Razur did, fast, under the table, where the bricks of cash wouldn’t draw attention. ‘Thanks. Sorry I’m not a trusting soul. You got the system?’

‘Yes.’ Evan brought the laptop out of a shopping bag he’d found in the back of the Jaguar.

‘I’m not really into breaking the law, I’m into technical challenges, showing up the bastards who think they’re so smart but they aren’t. Savvy?’

‘Savvy.’

Razur popped open his own sleek laptop, revved it up, cabled it to the Ethernet port of Khan’s machine. ‘I’ll run a program. If the password can be found in a dictionary, we’re in.’

He clicked keys. Evan watched as words began to rapid-fire scroll on a screen, faster than he could read them, throwing themselves against the gates of Khan’s laptop fortress.

After a few moments Razur said, ‘No joy. We’ll try it with alphanumerics thrown in at random and variant misspellings.’ Razur slurped at his coffee. Watched the slow, solemn rise of a status bar as millions of new combinations attempted to speak the open sesame of Khan’s laptop.

‘Hey, do you know much about handhelds?’ Evan asked.

‘Not my specialty. Low-powered buggers.’

Evan pulled Khan’s PDA out of his pocket, used his thumbprint to open it.

‘Biometric security,’ Razur said. ‘What have you got on your to-do list, stealing a nuclear weapon?’ He laughed.

‘Not today. What are these programs? I don’t recognize them.’

Razur studied the small screen. ‘My. I’d like to play with these. This one’s a cellular interference program – it would emit a signal to jam any cell phone in the room. Should we try?’ He grinned mischievously, eyeing the several customers chatting on their phones. Tapped the pad without waiting for Evan’s answer.

Within ten seconds everyone was frowning at his or her phone.

‘Ah, I think I just broke a law.’ Razur tapped again and the phone service seemed to return as the customers re-dialed and started their conversations again.

‘And this one’ – Razur tapped it open, studied the program with a frown – ‘it’s like what I’m using on your laptop. But specialized. For keypad alarm systems. Most have only a four-digit password. Patch into the alarm system and it would decipher and activate the code.’

‘You mean it would give me the code of an alarm system on the screen so I could enter it?’

‘I think that’s what it’s designed to do. Hmmm. This one copies a storage card or a hard drive. Compresses the data so it would fit on this PDA.’