Biowar by Stephen Coonts Read Free Book Online

his name. A light on the desk shielded from his view blinked green, and Rubens was allowed to proceed to the row of elevators at the side. Rubens pressed the middle button next to the middle door, holding his thumb there long enough for the scanning device inside to get a good read of his thumbprint. It matched it against the retina and voice information recorded and checked earlier and then delivered the car to his level.
    The K building—it had no other name—had been taken over by the Office of Homeland Security some months before. It was used primarily for high-level meetings of the type Rubens was now late for, though there were also a number of offices upstairs belonging to different departments in the country’s newest bureaucracy.
    Rubens did not particularly care for Homeland Security. While the lower rungs of the department were generally effective, he found the upper echelons amateurish and lacking in clout. In short, they were no threat to the NSA or Desk Three. He intended to do everything he could to keep it that way.
    The elevator doors opened on the basement conference level. A security guard shanghaied from the Coast Guard stood at ramrod attention across from the door, not even acknowledging Rubens as he passed down the hall to a maze-like entrance to the main conference room. The baffle was but one of the myriad protections against bugging installed in the room; it was a low-tech precaution against laser or other direct beam communications. Copper shielded the entire level; there were a variety of passive detectors to find clandestine transmissions as well as active disruptors or jammers in place to defeat them. Even Rubens’ encrypted phone connection with the Desk Three network would not work here.
    Not that Desk Three couldn’t have bugged the place if Rubens ordered it to.
    “Mr. Rubens. We’ve been waiting you.” Sandra Marshall was the Deputy Director of Homeland Security and generally rated as the heir apparent to Greg Johnson, who was spending less and less time in Washington as he tested the waters for a run at the Texas governorship.
    “But that’s not a problem,” Marshall added. “We told your secretary the meeting was a half hour earlier than it really was, knowing you’d be late.”
    This was a joke, and Rubens deeply resented it. But he smiled and sat down, pretending for the others that he was both good-natured and a regular guy. He feigned interest in the chitchat nearby, then watched Marshall as she called the working group on Internet security recommendations to order and began the meeting.
    Marshall had made a small fortune in Silicon Valley before joining the President’s campaign as a consultant on high-tech industry. She had parlayed that role into a post at the Pentagon, hopping from there to State and on to Homeland Security in a matter of weeks. For a woman of thirty-three (she gave her age as twenty-eight, a modest and passable fib as such things went) her body remained well toned. She was not conventionally beautiful or even pretty, but of special interest to Rubens were her eyes; in his experience, every woman in Washington, even the young ones, had thick, puffy eyes from overwork and lack of sleep—or from partying, depending on the woman in question. Sandra Marshall’s eyes were smooth and clear.
    “I had breakfast with the President last Thursday,” said Marshall, “and he mentioned how very interested he is in our project, and he specifically endorsed something to apply to all computers at all times. Something radical, and something that will provide the highest level of security to all people. To individuals, not just to the people downstream, the servers and companies.”
    “The initiative should end identity theft as we know it,” said Griffin Bolso, who was representing FBI Director Robert Freeman.
    “Exactly.”
    Rubens had heard various proposals to improve Internet security for individual users over the years. With a few notable exceptions, most