Ruth Wind - Countdown

Exercise would help clear the cobwebs. She tossed a towel over her shoulder and made her way into the fitness center.

There were few people around. Although the NSA worked around the clock, this was generally a lull period. Scott had claimed a treadmill in the empty line, and she took the one beside him. She punched in numbers to get to a moderate jog and found her pace, then said, “So what’s going down? If you were a terrorist, what would you be targeting?”

He shook his head. His jaw was grim. “The elections are a possibility.”

The presidential elections would be held in a few weeks, and there had been a great deal of controversy over the incumbent, President James Whitlow. “Who’d be the best target?”

“I’d kill the young, handsome one,” he said.

Kim chuckled. “Personally dislike the guy, huh?”

“It’s the tragedy factor—an old guy gets blown up, even if he’s a president, it’s not as big a deal as when a charming and handsome younger guy gets it.”

“Good point.” Kim nodded. “Then again, terrorists have little love for the president, and it’s plain he’s not particularly effective at home or abroad.”

“Especially in Berzhaan.”

“Right. All the more reason terrorists might target him. Or maybe to get people to vote the way they want them to, as with Spain and maybe this new Munich thing. Get them to vote for Monihan.”

Scott made a derisive noise. “I’m still having trouble taking Monihan seriously.”

Kim wiped a lock of hair out of her eyes. “What’s the matter, Shepherd? He’s prettier than you?”

“Nah. I’m serious here. He’s too young, and the only reason he’s so popular is because all these women are swooning over his pretty face.”

“So, you’ve got to be old and ugly to be a good president?”

He shot her a grin. “Adds dignity.”

Kim rolled her eyes. “And Whitlow is so dignified.”

“He’s a statesman of the old school, you gotta admit.”

“Mmm. The who-cares-where-the-money-comes-from-as-long-as-I-get-elected school.” Whitlow was suspected of accepting money from a drug lord in Puerto Isla, and worse, sending in a SEAL force, which was then demolished, to cover it up. “Whitlow’s finished.”

“Maybe. Unless they kill Monihan.”

They ran in silence for a moment. Feet thumped rhythmically against the rubberized mats, and the motors whirred quietly. Kim felt her breath going deeper, expanding her lungs with oxygen—oxygen that then enlivened her brain cells.

“They’re planning something big,” Scott said grimly. “I feel it in my gut.”

“Me, too. If we don’t break this code, what are we going to find out in the worst way?”

“Exactly.”

“It’s a pretty sophisticated network,” Kim said. “So we’re looking at high-level planning.”

“It’d be nice if terrorists were as stupid as criminals, but they wouldn’t get far in the modern world.”

She grinned.

They ran in companionable silence for a while. After a few minutes, Kim felt a click of endorphins, and the stress seemed to drain out of her body in a rush, as if someone had pulled a plug in her toe. “Ah,” she said, and blew out hard. “Better.”

She glanced at Scott, who had sweat pouring down his rugged, well-cut face. “Admit it,” she said. “This feels pretty good.”

“Yeah, Valenti, you’re as smart as you are good-looking.”

“Sweet-talker.”

He blotted his face. “So they say.”

“The secretarial pool swoons when you walk through, Shepherd, along with half the cryptographers.” She gave him a sidelong grin. “Male and female.”

“Why do you keep ribbing me about this, huh? I think you have a secret crush on me.”

“That’s true. And you know me, I’m so mild mannered, I can’t come right out and say it.”

He laughed. “Mild mannered. Yeah, right.” He punched the controls. “Climb some hills?”

“You bet.” She punched in the incline numbers and grinned. It was the reason she liked working out with him—he was extremely competitive and pushed her to better levels. The hills were a point of pride. He’d grown up in Colorado, in a little ski town, and boasted terrific lung capacity. Kim had gone to prep school in Arizona, running the scorching mountain paths around Phoenix, and boasted her own great lungs.

They’d been in some grim contests. “Six,” she said, referring to the level of incline on the treadmill.

He nodded. They ran, breath coming too hard now for brainstorming or any other kind of conversation.

As her body sweated, her brain awakened, ran a thousand algorithms, trying to fit the pieces together. It wasn’t exactly a one-two-three process, a conscious thing, but a running stream of numbers, letters, patterns.

“Seven,” Scott said.

Kim punched the up arrow on the treadmill and leaned forward the slightest bit to accommodate the greater incline. The numbers and patterns kept whirring in her head. Once her brother Jason had asked her how she came up with the answers to number problems so fast, and she’d considered it seriously for a minute. The best analogy she could think of was a visual of a bike lock with spinning wheels. She just saw them, and they whirred until the right number appeared.

Her brain had always run patterns, looking for the ways things fit together. In the second grade, she’d been doing the newspaper Scramble every morning, and always got it right, even if she didn’t necessarily know the word. By fourth grade, even her very traditional Italian father was forced to admit his daughter was something of a math whiz. They’d had to hire a tutor to keep up with her.

Her thighs started to burn the slightest bit, and her breath came harder. Next to her, Scott lifted an eyebrow. His athletic arms, bared by a serviceable gray tank, were shiny. “Eight,” she said.

“Nine,” he countered.

She didn’t even bother to look at him, just pushed the arrow one more time. Sweat poured down her spine in a wash, and she wiped it off her forehead. Her feet clumped hard on the rubber matting, a fact she usually hated. Tonight, the sound was lost in the heavier pounding of Scott’s tread.

The patterns whirred in her mind, and she stared into the middle distance, not seeing the white-painted cinder-block wall with its poster citing heart-rate targets, but a stream of code. Ordinarily, e-mails were a less difficult form of code to crack, because certain elements, such as headers and addresses, remained constant, and once the code could be cracked there, it fell wide open.

Not in this case. The agency had collected hundreds of e-mails over the past several weeks, as many as fifty in a single day, but in spite of their best efforts with computer algorithms and sophisticated code-breaking software, they’d made no headway.

“What…” Kim gasped, “are we…missing?”

“Network,” he growled. “Some network angle.”

Her breath was growing ragged, and her thighs were burning. She ran five to seven miles a day, as well as lifting weights and practicing kung fu for strength, but the hills were always killer. Licking salt from her upper lip, she slid a glance toward her partner to see how he was holding up.

Sweat soaked his shirt and his streaky blond hair, but Kim only needed that one glance to know he’d hit his stride. Back straight, breath heavy but even. It was easy to see him running up some forested mountain trail at ten thousand feet, his powerful body in perfect condition. Like an ad for a sport drink.

“Uncle,” she said, and pushed the arrows to bring the incline down to a more normal level.

“Thank God,” he said. “I thought it was going to be me this time.”

“Damn,” she said, and blew out a heavy breath. “One of these days, Shepherd, I am going to kick your high-altitude butt.”