The End Game by Raymond Khoury Read Free Book Online Page A

hacked the CIA’s D-bases deeper than anyone I know. And the cool part is she’s ideologically neutral. She hacks because she can.”
    “And to impress you, of course.”
    He beamed. “What can I tell you? I’m a catch.”
    I rolled my eyes, but my mouth smiled. He really was a lovable son of a bitch. I hoped Gigi wasn’t about to break his heart, and not just because that would screw us both.
    “OK, so she’s amazing.” Clearly, I need to retract my grumpy earlier criticism about contemporary word use. “So what did she find?”
    He grimaced. “Well, it’s good and it’s bad.”
    My entire body tensed in anticipation. Maybe our search was finally going to move out of park. “What do you mean?”
    He closed the space between us. “She went in and snooped around the user records and protocol logs related to the terms I’d been using in my searches around both Corrigan and your dad and came up with nothing. Then she went in again and went deeper. Still nothing. Then a couple of days later, we tried again, only this time, the logs and the user records themselves were gone. Everything that had data links to our target folders. Gone. I mean, up until now, they’ve been changing the access codes as per standard operation procedure at Langley. But in the last week, they’ve modified the protocols and wiped dozens of files.”
    He gave me that knowing look, the one loaded with portent.
    I already knew the answer, but I asked anyway, “So they know we’ve been looking?”
    He nodded, his eyes even wider with conspiracy.
    “I’m having a hard time seeing anything ‘good’ here, Kurt.”
    “Well, yeah, agreed, that part’s not great. But there’s more. Gigi, she doesn’t give up easy. And this was like a challenge for her, like they’d thrown down the gauntlet. So she goes into overdrive and starts trying all kinds of things, including this little trick of hers. She tries misspelling Corrigan in her trawl. She thinks laterally like that, you know?” He paused and nodded, more just to himself, grinning with admiration, savoring the thought. “And she got a hit. One with an ‘m’ at the end, as in, Corriga m .”
    “You’re kidding.”
    “I’m telling you. She says it was more common than you’d think before spellchecking technology closed that crack.”
    He went quiet again. Kurt had this irritating habit of pausing to build portent. Maybe he’d watched too many badly written TV shows and it had affected the cadence at which he spoke.
    “And . . . ?”
    “She found a reference to Reed Corrigam—with an ‘m’—in a deep archive. It was in a report from the Direccíon de Inteligencia —the DI, Cuba’s intelligence agency.”
    I knew what the DI was, but I didn’t want to burst his bubble. We at the Bureau had been known to butt heads with their operatives in Miami. Instead, I just said, “Makes sense. They would have been operational in El Salvador back then.”
    Kurt nodded, then looked around suspiciously, gave our surroundings a second pan-and-scan, then pulled some folded papers out from his pocket and handed them to me. “It’s all in here. It talks about a meeting a DI guy had with Corrigan. It says there was a leak from the DI, and the DI agent is only referred to by his initials, but it mentions the name ‘Octavio Camacho’ as well and I googled that. The hit that seemed most promising was this guy,” he said as he flicked through the printouts before pulling out a particular page. “He was a Portuguese journalist.”
    “‘Was?’”
    “Yep. Camacho died in 1981.”
    I flicked back to the report about the meeting. It had also taken place that year—a couple of months before Camacho’s death.
    I could feel my shoulders drop. “That’s it?”
    Kurt’s face followed suit. “So far. But she’s still at it. She’s trying to hack some digitized archive backups. The encryption-compression algorithms aren’t as secure as those for live data. At least not for Gigi when