White: A Novel by Christopher Whitcomb Read Free Book Online Page A

to move higher.
    “Is she here yet?” Mitchell asked. He sat at a massive red oak conference table with four other men, running his hands over a rare three-barreled Drilling, which he had just obtained from a museum curator in Stuttgart. The magnificent rifle bore intricate Black Forest engravings along its Brazilian rosewood stock, nickel receiver, and ivory trigger guard. It had eluded him for years, but like all great conquests, this had been worth the wait.
    “Yes, she’s on her way up,” Trask said. Mitchell’s chief of staff moved through a stack of folders, preparing for what promised to be a particularly busy day. “Should I have the weapon mounted for you, Mr. Mitchell?”
    The men sat in what was known within the company as the War Room, a sanctum sanctorum defined by claro walnut paneling, Tiffany lamps, and the stale smell of fear. Floor-to-ceiling display cases lined two walls, each filled with hundreds of weapons—Henry buffalo guns in .5440, Winchester carbines, Remington prototypes, Belgian Brownings, Damascus steel Parkers, early Kentucky flintlocks, Colt Peacemakers in shiny nickel and gunmetal blue. This extraordinary collection—rare specimens that chronicled the history of war and predation—offered threatening testament to Mitchell’s might. When he brought executives in for a meeting, he expected allegiance. If these rifles suggested consequence, so be it.
    “I hope I didn’t keep you,” Sirad said, striding into the room. She wore black running tights and a bright-yellow slicker, which she had unzipped to reveal a formfitting white turtleneck underneath. Melting snow dripped off her clothing, forming puddles on the palace-sized Oushak carpet beneath her feet. “I was running in the park.”
    “There’s a blizzard out there,” Trask reminded her. He tried, as always, not to stare.
    “I know,” she said. “Beautiful, isn’t it?”
    Sirad dabbed her face with a towel as Mitchell carefully laid the beautiful three-barreled rifle on a velvet serviette. The only sound in the room came from steam radiators hissing against the frigid air outside.
    “Did they tell you why we brought you in?” Mitchell asked. He looked elegant as always, resplendent in custom-tailored wools and hand-tooled wing tips.
    “Something about an attack on the Quantis system,” Sirad said. She nodded to the others at the table, all Borders Atlantic executives. They shared troubling history—this unlikely assembly—but Sirad managed to put it out of her mind.
    “There’s a possibility that our algorithms have been compromised,” Mitchell told her. “That someone has discovered the existence of a trapdoor.”
    “Impossible,” Sirad argued. “Quantis is a hard system, impervious to intrusion. We’re certain of that.”
    She walked across the room, pulled out a chair, and sat. Under normal circumstances, she would have used her thinly clothed physique to improper advantage, but here in the boardroom, beauty actually worked against her. Power at Borders Atlantic revolved around intelligence and wit. Standing there in a film of moistened Lycra rendered her naked in an oddly uncomfortable way.
    “We’re certain that it is impervious to every intrusion
we
could think of,” Mitchell agreed, “but impervious is a relative term. Someone apparently thinks it worth the effort.”
    “Where did you find it?” Sirad asked. She ran the towel over the back of her neck, then draped it over her shoulders, covering nipples that had hardened conspicuously from the cold. “Are they trying to tap our data streams or going after the encryption rubrics themselves?”
    “Neither,” came the reply. Sirad turned toward Dieter Planck, the company’s chief security officer. The squat, dimple-cheeked German sat just across the table from her, wrinkling his nose beneath frameless oval glasses.
    “They haven’t completely shown themselves yet,” a second man said. Sirad knew the mathematician by his first name only: Ravi.