JAMES ROLLINS: SANDSTORM

But at the moment, it was not a deer or a fox being hunted.

Painter’s quarry was a Chinese computer scientist, Xin Zhang.

Zhang, better known by his alias, Kaos, was a hacker and code breaker of prodigious talent, one of China’s finest. After reading his dossier, Painter had learned respect for the slim man in the Ralph Lauren suit. During the past three years, he had orchestrated a successful wave of computer espionage upon U.S. soil. His latest acquisition: plasma weapons technology out of Los Alamos.

Painter’s target finally shoved up from the pai gow table.

“Would you like to color out, Dr. Zhang?” the pit boss asked, standing over the table like a captain at the prow of his boat. At seven in the morning, there was only the lone player…and his bodyguards.

The isolation required Painter to spy upon his quarry from a safe distance. Suspicions could not be aroused. Especially not so late in the game.

Zhang shifted the pile of black chips toward the dealer, a woman with bored eyes. As the dealer stacked the winnings, Painter studied his target.

Zhang proved the stereotype of the Chinese as inscrutable He had a poker face that gave no obvious tell, no idiosyncratic tic that denoted a good or a bad hand. He simply played his game.

Like he did now.

None would guess from the man’s appearance that he was a master criminal, wanted in fifteen countries. He dressed like a typical Western businessman: a sharply tailored suit in an understated pinstripe, a silk tie, a platinum Rolex. Still, there remained a certain austere aesthetic quality to him. His black hair was shaved around the ears and back, leaving only a crisp crown of hair on top of his head, not unlike a monk. He wore a pinched set of eyeglasses, circular lenses, faintly tinted blue, a studious countenance.

At last the dealer waved her hands over the stack of chips, showing her empty fingers and palms to the security cameras hidden in the black mirrored domes in the ceiling.

“Fifty thousand dollars even,” she finished.

The pit boss nodded. The dealer counted out the amount in thousand-dollar chips. “More good luck, sir,” the boss acknowledged.

Without even a nod, Zhang departed with his two bodyguards. He had been gambling all night. Dawn already glimmered. The CyberCrime forum would resume in another three hours. The conference covered the latest trends in identity theft, infrastructure protection, and myriad other security topics.

In two hours, a breakfast symposium put on by Hewlett Packard would commence. Zhang would make the transfer during that meeting. His American contact was still unknown. It was one of the main objectives of the ops here. Besides securing the weapons data, they sought to flush out Zhang’s stateside contact, someone tied to a shady network that traded in military secrets and technologies.

It was a mission that must not fail.

Painter followed the group. His superiors at DARPA had personally tapped him for this mission, in part for his expertise in micro-surveillance and computer engineering, but more importantly, for his ability to blend in at Foxwoods.

Though only half-blooded, Painter had inherited enough of his father’s features to pass as a Pequot Indian. It did take a few trips to a tanning salon to enrich his complexion and brown contact lenses to hide his mother’s blue eyes. But afterward, with his shoulder-length hair the color of a raven’s wing, presently tied back in a tail, he did look like his father. To finish his disguise, he wore a casino suit with the symbol of the Pequot tribe embroidered on the pocket, a tree atop a knoll framed against a clear sky. Who looked beyond a suit anyway?

From his position, Painter remained wary as he followed Zhang. His eyes never focused directly upon the group. He watched peripherally and used natural cover to the best advantage. He stalked his quarry through the neon woodlands of blinking machines and wide glades of green felt tables. He maintained his distance and varied his pace and direction.

His earpiece buzzed with Mandarin. Zhang’s voice. Picked up by the microtransceiver. Zhang was heading back to his suite.

Painter touched his throat microphone and subvocalized into the radio. “Sanchez, how are you picking up on the feed?”

“Loud and clear, Commander.”

His co-agent on this mission, Cassandra Sanchez, was holed up in the suite across the hall from Zhang’s, manning the surveillance array.

“How is the subdermal holding?” he asked her.

“He’d better access his computer soon. The bug is running low on juice.”

Painter frowned. The “bug” had been planted yesterday on Zhang during a massage. Sanchez’s Latino features were dark enough to pass for Indian. She had implanted the subdermal transceiver during a deep-tissue massage last night, the prick of penetration unfelt as she dug her thumbs in deep. She covered the tiny puncture wound with an anesthetic smear of surgical bond. By the time the massage was over, it had sealed and dried. The digital microtransceiver had a life span of only twelve hours.

“How much time left?”

“Best estimate… eighteen minutes.”

“Damn.”

Painter focused his full attention back on his quarry’s conversation.

The man kept his voice low, meant for his bodyguards only. Painter, fluent in Mandarin, listened. He hoped Zhang would give some indication when he would retrieve the plasma weapons file. He was disappointed.

“Have the girl ready after I’ve showered,” Zhang said.

Painter tightened a fist. The “girl” was thirteen, an indentured slave from North Korea. His daughter, he had explained to those who even thought to ask. If this had been true, incest could be added to the long list of charges to which Zhang was guilty.

Following them, Painter skirted around a change booth and set off down a long bank of machines, paralleling his quarry. A jackpot rang out from a dollar slot machine. The winner, a middle-aged man in a jogging suit, smiled and looked around for someone to share his good fortune. There was only Painter.

“I won!” he cried jubilantly, eyes red-rimmed from playing all night.

Painter nodded. “More good luck, sir,” he answered, repeating the pit boss’s earlier words, and strode past the man. There were no real winners here-except the casino. The slot machines alone netted eight hundred million dollars last year. It seemed the Pequot tribe had come a long way from its 1980s sand-and-gravel business.

Unfortunately, Painter’s father had missed out on the boom, abandoning the reservation in the early eighties to pursue his fortune in New York City. It was there he met Painter’s mother, a fiery Italian woman who would eventually stab her husband to death after seven years of marriage and the birth of their son. With his mother on death row, Painter had grown up in a series of foster homes, where he quickly learned it was best to keep silent, to be unseen.

It had been his first training in stealth…but not his last.

Zhang’s group entered the Grand Pequot Tower’s elevator lobby, showing their suite key to the security guard.

Painter crossed past the opening. He had a Glock 9mm in a holster at the base of his back, covered by his casino jacket. He had to resist pulling it out and shooting Zhang in the back of the head, execution style.

But that would not achieve their objective: to recover the schematics and research for the orbital plasma cannon. Zhang had managed to steal the data from a secure federal server, leaving a worm behind. The next morning, a Los Alamos technician by the name of Harry Klein accessed the file, inadvertently releasing the data worm that proceeded to eat all references of the weapon while defecating a false trail that implicated Klein. That bit of computerized sleight of hand cost investigators two weeks as they pursued the false trail.