Mark Alpert - Extinction

But he wouldn’t talk about what happened in Nairobi. He never went near the subject. By the time Layla entered her teens she wanted to know more about the embassy bombing, but her father refused to say a word. For a long time she quietly accepted this, but as the years passed she grew resentful. She decided to learn as much as she could about the terrorist attack, gleaning details from all the sources available on the Internet. She was already quite adept at hacking, so she focused on infiltrating the network operated by the U.S. State Department.

Her first big success came in her senior year of high school when she downloaded a State Department file describing the events leading up to the attack. From this document she learned that in the mid-1990s Al Qaeda had been looking for ways to retaliate against the CIA. The agency had already begun its rendition program, capturing Al Qaeda terrorists around the world and sending them to Egypt, where they were tortured by that country’s secret police. Then, in Layla’s sophomore year in college, she broke into the State Department network again and found a classified report on the renditions. This report mentioned that other government agencies helped the CIA catch the terrorists and transfer them to Egypt. One of those agencies was the NSA, and one of the key participants in the effort was then-Major James T. Pierce.

Layla immediately confronted her father with this discovery. As she expected, he became angry and defensive. The terrorists were plotting against America, he said. There wasn’t enough evidence to prosecute them in the United States, so sending them to Egypt was the only solution. But Layla was unconvinced. She’d previously seen her father as simply a victim of the bombing, but now she knew he was partially responsible. “You knew there was a war going on,” she told him. “And you put your own family right in the middle of it.” Her father reacted furiously: “I had no idea there was any danger in Nairobi! None of the intelligence reports showed any warning signs there!” But Layla was equally furious. “There were signs,” she told him. “But you were too arrogant to see them. You didn’t see the consequences of what you were doing until they blew up in your face.”

That argument was the breaking point for Layla and her father. Soon afterward she dropped out of college and started working for InfoLeaks, devoting herself to the ideals of truth and transparency. But now she realized she was also driven by a self-destructive impulse. She liked to cause trouble. It had become her main way of expressing herself. And now she was in very big trouble indeed.

After an hour at sea, the Mexican shoreline was no longer visible. Layla turned around, facing forward, and on the western horizon she saw a boat. At first it was just a silhouette, but as they drew closer the size of the vessel became apparent. It was a motorized megayacht, more than two hundred feet long, bristling with antennas and satellite dishes. Christened the Athena , it had a catamaran-like double hull and a pair of turbojet engines that could reach speeds as high as seventy knots. The Athena was the mobile headquarters of InfoLeaks, and it was designed to outrun even the fastest patrol ships.

Layla had arranged this rendezvous by e-mail, using a computer at a copy shop in Monterrey nine hours ago. Felipe stared at the yacht, astonished, as he maneuvered his dinghy next to the starboard hull. Then Layla said goodbye to the fisherman and boarded the Athena , climbing a stairway to the top deck. Waiting there to greet her was Gabriel Schroeder, owner of the Athena and founder of InfoLeaks. Layla had met him several times before; he was a slender, boyish forty-year-old with lanky blond hair and freakishly pale skin. He’d made his fortune in the German software business and still dressed like a computer programmer, in frayed jeans and an old T-shirt, but he’d used his money to surround himself with gorgeously chic assistants. He was flanked by two women, a willowy blonde in a sundress and an athletic brunette in a red bikini. Although Layla admired what Schroeder had done with InfoLeaks, she wasn’t so enamored of the man himself. He seemed to be interested in only two things: pissing off powerful men and bedding beautiful women.

Schroeder stepped forward and kissed her on both cheeks. “Good to see you again, liebchen . We were starting to worry.” He glanced at the pouch in her hands. “Is this the package you mentioned in the e-mail?”

Layla unzipped the pouch and removed the specimen jar. “Do you have any technical staff on this boat?”

“ Ja, of course.” He squinted at the fly inside the jar. “What on earth is that thing?”

“It’s a microdrone. Apparently developed by the Chinese. We need to photograph it and post the pictures on the Web site. But tell your people to use tweezers when handling it. The bug is dead, but it has a mechanical stinger that still works.” She handed the jar to Schroeder, then gave him the flash drive. “And we need to translate these two Mandarin files into English. One of them seems to be a technical document describing the electronics implanted in the fly. The other file I can’t make heads or tails of.”

Schroeder smiled. “As always, you’re very efficient, Fraulein Pierce.” He gave her an admiring glance, his eyes roving up and down her body. Then he pointed to the brunette on his left. “As it turns out, we have a Mandarin speaker right here who can translate the files. Let me introduce you to one of my assistants, Angelique Laplace. Her father is French and her mother is Chinese.”

Angelique had a figure that belonged on a magazine cover. She nodded at Layla, then took the flash drive from Schroeder. “I’ll get right on it,” she said, her face serious. She turned around and headed for the lower decks, where all the computers were.

Layla frowned. She had a prejudice against beautiful women. Schroeder turned to the other one, the blonde, and told her to take the specimen jar to the Web site manager’s cabin. A moment later, the Athena ’s turbojet engines started up with a roar. The boat began to skim over the Pacific, heading south.

Schroeder turned back to Layla, his eyes running over her body again. “You arrived just in time. We need to make a quick getaway.”

“What do you mean? We’re being pursued?”

He pointed toward the yacht’s stern. “Two U.S. Navy warships are shadowing us. One is a destroyer, the U.S.S. Dewey . The other is the U.S.S. Freedom , a coastal patrol boat.”

Layla craned her neck, scanning the horizon behind the boat. “I don’t see anything.”

“They’re sixty kilometers away. We see them on the radar and in the satellite photos.”

“They wouldn’t intercept us in international waters, would they?”

“The rumor we’ve heard is that they’re planning to accuse us of drug-running. They’re probably fabricating the evidence right now, so it’ll be ready by the time the Pentagon holds its press conference.” He frowned. “But they’re in for a surprise. The Freedom is one of the fastest ships in the navy, but the Athena is faster.”

As if to back up Schroeder’s words, the boat’s engines throttled up to a higher pitch and the twin hulls leaped over the waves. The wind on the deck grew so strong that Layla had to grab the railing. Schroeder led her to a sheltered spot behind one of the Zodiac lifeboats. “Unfortunately, we have another problem,” he said. “The satellite photos show two more warships in this part of the eastern Pacific. They’re a thousand kilometers southwest of here and moving rapidly in this direction. They appear to be working in concert with the Dewey and the Freedom , trying to trap us.”