Gregg Loomis - The Pegasus Secret

Jacob opened the door. Even in the hall, Lang could smell something besides his pipe. Rachel in the kitchen.

Jacob gestured Lang inside, his glance up and down the hall more of a nervous tic than a conscious movement. "Glad you're back safely. Stockwell any help?"

"He was, yes," Lang said, handing over the keys to the Morris as he crossed the threshold.

The apartment was the antithesis of Jacob's office. The furniture was contemporary, glass and chrome that made Lang nostalgic for home. Lucite shelves along one wall held a few books and several pieces of modern sculpture that possibly had begun life as engine parts. Two walls held art that bore a resemblance to the splattist works Lang had seen the day before. The remaining wall was glass, through which Lang could see a small deck and a panorama of the Thames that, in the darkening afternoon, reminded him of Monet's Houses of Parliament.

Jacob was waiting for further explanation but Lang asked first, "What did you learn about Pegasus?"

Jacob settled onto a sofa, leather slung like a hammock on a chrome stand, and fumbled a pipe from the pocket of a shabby sweater. "Quite a bit, actually."

Lang sat and waited impatiently as Jacob went through the ritual of lighting up.

"Pegasus," Jacob said among puffs of smoke, "Pegasus, of course, was the winged horse of Greek mythology that caused the stream Hippocrene to spring from Mount Helicon with a blow from his hoof."

Lang shifted in his seat, hoping Jacob would get to the point sooner rather than later.

"I have no idea as to the relationship between a mythical animal and a commercial enterprise," Jacob admitted, "but the company is interesting in several respects. First…"

Sucking loudly, he stopped to dig in the briar with what looked like a nail. Lang suppressed an urge to throw the damn pipe out the window. "I know the relationship with the mythical animal. But the company…?"

"… A Channel Island corporation, based in Jersey." Jacob arched those buglike eyebrows in an implied question.

"You mean it has bank and corporate secrecy," Lang said. "By law, the identity of the shareholders and officers are confidential and any transactions on the Channel Islands aren't taxed."

Jacob had his pipe smoldering again. "Just so. Legally, we would have no way of knowing that the company has annual receipts of several billion dollars. Quite extraordinary considering it produces nothing, performs no ascertainable services."

Lang let out a low whistle. "Jesus, that's an income larger than the gross national product of a lot of countries. Where does it come from?"

"Even more interesting: a number of sources, all either overtly Roman Catholic, like the Pope's investments and discretionary funds, or strongly influenced by the Church, like a number of Catholic relief agencies."

Lang realized he was gaping, then asked, "For what? I mean, that pays off a lot of winning bingo cards."

Jacob shrugged. "Unfortunately Mossad is an intelligence source staffed, by definition, by those unlikely to be privy to the workings of the Catholic Church, the Vatican or the Papal State. Whatever Pegasus does, it doesn't do it by phone, e-mail or fax, anything Echelon monitors. Mossad's known about it for years, never found it interesting."

Never found it threatening to the Jewish State, Lang thought. "Any idea where the money goes?"

Jacob was probing the pipe again, this time with a wooden match. "Geographically? Europe mostly. A chain of sausage restaurants. in Germany, petrol dealers in the UK., ski and sea resorts in France. Too many businesses to track just out of curiosity, and communications between them are encrypted. They don't seem to be breaking any laws, pay taxes when they can't be avoided, that sort of thing."

Lang thought for a moment. These were all businesses with high cash potentials. "Sounds like money laundering to me. Any contacts in Asia, South America, places where narcotraffic is heavy?"

Jacob was sucking on his pipe again. He shook his head.

"Any individual names?"

"As I said, Mossad isn't particularly interested. I had to call a lot of favors due to get what, I did."

"What about Jersey? Is the island just a mail drop or does Pegasus have some sort of operation there?"

"Can't say. I can tell you that a disproportionate number of communications go through a Lisbon exchange. Could be just a switching point, could mean they do business there."

Impatiently, Lang watched his friend apply yet another match to the bowl of his pipe and suck until blue smoke poured out of it.

"One really strange thing," he said at last. "Little hamlet in the southwest of France, Burgundy. Rennes-le something… Rennes-le-Château. Wire transfers there to what I'd guess is a dummy corporation. Small amounts but on a regular basis. They've got no operations there we – Echelon – could find."

Lang leaned back in his chair, more leather slung on a chrome frame. "Rennes-le-Château? Never heard of it."

"I found it in the atlas. Somewhere near the Pyrenees."

"The Languedoc region?"

Jacob was knocking the pipe's contents out into a glass ashtray that seemed fragile enough to shatter from the effort. The intensity in Lang's tone made him look up. "I think so, yes."

The American stood. "The atlas, you have it here?".. Jacob was clearly puzzled at Lang's sudden interest in geography. "Well, yes…"

The doorbell rang.

Jacob carefully laid his pipe in the ashtray and went to the door, squinting through the peephole. "Sure you weren't followed?"…

"Followed? By whom?"

Jacob's eye was still against the hole. "Coppers, by the look of 'em."

London, Mayfair

At the same time

The computer screen washed Gurt's face in blue light. Overhead, the glare of the unremitting fluorescent bulbs made the basement of 24 Grosvenor Square resemble an operating theater. In its own way, the room was as antiseptic as any surgery, as clear of electronic bacteria as a hospital of the conventional kind. Electronically swept daily, every inch was videotaped on a continuing twenty-four hour reel. Even so, the room was partitioned off by seamless glass, a feature that prompted its regular occupants to refer to it as "the fish bowl." It was the most secure part of the American embassy's secured sections, the part where the Agency did its work.

Gurt's security clearance was high enough to access the information she was seeking, a closed personnel file, but clearances did not impress the cybergods who dictated the time required to comply with a request of the system.

She hit the "enter" key for the second time in a fruitless effort to speed a response, impatiently muttering a curse to which her native tongue gave special emphasis. As though she had spoken a magical password, the file she sought appeared. Scanning it, she committed parts to memory. Note-taking of any sort was forbidden.

She was about to close out when a blinking red light at the bottom of the screen caught her attention. She frowned, entering another access code.

Someone had managed to hack into the system, into this specific file.-Unbelievable! The network's complexity made the Pentagon's look like a child's puzzle in comparison. Ten minutes' further investigation was useless. This was a case for the Agency's supernerds, cybergurus who, unknown to the public, had successfully traced the worldwide Love Bug and Melissa viruses of a few years back to their authors.

As with those viruses, the intruder had routed his inquiries through a number of computers belonging to individuals and companies across the globe, innocent hosts for electronic burglary. But whoever he was, the Agency's reverse cookie had made certain he had left cyberevidence of his entry and departure, the time and date. The date, she saw, was yesterday.