Joshua`s Hammer by David Hagberg Read Free Book Online Page B

their fingers burned big time."
    McGarvey felt a cold draft on his neck. "Do you have the proof?" Otto was almost always right, but he had to ask.
    Rencke took a diskette out of the thick file he'd brought with him. "When it boots up hit any key."
    McGarvey started the disk, and immediately a complicated engineering diagram in 3-D came up on his screen and began to slowly rotate around its long axis. He stared at the device for a long time, his stomach sour, because he knew exactly what it was capable of doing to them.
    "I matched the number Trumble gave us with the Russian device."
    Sometimes Rencke amazed even McGarvey. "How'd you come up with that?"
    Otto grinned. "The FSB is running its own investigation, and I talked to some friends of mine in Amsterdam who hacked the system. That one was missing."
    "Why didn't you get in yourself?"
    "I wanted to keep it arm's length this time. No telling what the fallout's gonna be."
    McGarvey nodded at the obvious understatement. "Where'd it come from?"
    "Right where we suspected all along. Yavan Depot."
    "Tajikistan," McGarvey said. The former Soviet ground forces special storage depot was located about twenty-five miles southeast of the capital city Dushanbe. It had long been suspected, but never proved, that a small Russian maintenance crew, mostly officers, had been left behind to look after their equipment, for which the independent government received money and kept silent. But money, which was not a problem for bin Laden, was tight in Russia so loyalties had blurred.
    "I'm going to need more than this," McGarvey said.
    Rencke laid the thick file on the desk. "I made hard copies. I got the names of the four Russian officers under investigation, their contacts, the how and when they got it out of the depot three months ago, the thirty million U.S. they were paid for it, and where it crossed the border at Nizhny Pyandzh into Afghanistan." Otto shrugged. "After that it disappears." His eyes were wild. "But bin Laden has the number, so we know where it showed up."
    "Okay, who are these friends of yours in Amsterdam?" It was the news he'd been expecting, and yet it was none the less frightening.
    "Just kids," Rencke said. "Their parents were the ones who hacked the system over at Lawrence Livermore in the eighties. Only way we found out about it was because they'd screwed up the payroll section. Wouldn't balance."
    "Think they can get back into the FSB system?"
    "The Russians aren't spending much on security, but their encryption programs are still pretty good. What do you want them to look for?"
    "I want to know what the FSB is doing about this. They sure as hell wouldn't tell me if I picked up the phone and called Kuznetsov." Anatoli Kuznetsov was the director of the Federal Security Service, which was the new KGB.
    "They got in that far, they could take the next step." Otto grinned again, which he did whenever he was contemplating doing something illegal. "I can give them a little incentive."
    McGarvey gave him a hard look. "I brought you back to help out, not to give away the store."
    "Mac, this is worth it, if we can stop the bastard. The
    next time out ain't gonna be so pretty. All I'm giving them is an encryption buster. An old one we don't use anymore."
    "Okay, so what about the guy with bin Laden that Alien told us about?"
    "I came up with a dozen possibilities, but I've gone as far with them as I can without more hard information. A description from another source, something in his handwriting, maybe a strand of hair, or a recording of his voice. Anything."
    "Maybe I can help with that."
    Otto's eyes went wide. "Come on, Mac, you're not telling me what I think you're telling me now, are you? Bzz, wrong answer, recruit. Wrong, wrong, wrong."
    McGarvey smiled sadly for his friend. Candide once said that optimism is a mania for maintaining that all is well when things are going badly. He'd never been guilty of that frame of mind, or of its opposite, though both were common