BETA - Project Avatar, page 9
“It sounds like the hijackers were bartering information, to get themselves out of a tough spot,” he suggested.
“But what kind of dirt could they possibly have on me? I never saw any of them before in my life.
Abe didn’t respond, but she caught him cutting a quick look her way, as if he hoped she was going to tell him the answer. The broad raft of traffic began advancing across town again, and the din grew even louder.
“I swear I don’t know,” Dee told him with great emphasis. She really needed him to believe this.
He turned and gave her a frank look, uncharacteristically serious. He said, “It couldn’t have been . . . you know . . .”
He was talking about PKI. She kept her eyes on his and shook her head firmly.
“Sorry I even have to ask you,” he said. “Nothing that might have served as a hint . . . or led someone to figure it out?”
She kept shaking her head. “Never. Absolutely not.”
“All right. Me, either. In case you’ve been wondering.” His eyes wandered off to watch the traffic milling and churning around them. “Well, that much is good, anyway. Look, I would love to help you track this thing down, but I can’t, of course.”
“I know.”
“After all, I don’t know anything at all about your old contracts—or your new ones, for that matter. When you get down to the nuts-and-bolts level I have only the vaguest idea of what you do for a living.”
She nodded. “It’s the nature of the job. Don’t worry, you’re doing more for me than any friend could ever hope for. I’ll never forget it.”
“Okay, I can live with that. But I’ll sleep a lot easier when you’re out of Bangalore, so when you’re ready to leave, let me know. I have contacts in lots of different places. Most of them are good people, and some of them even owe me favors.”
“Thanks a million.” She leaned over and gave him a kiss on the cheek. He grumbled irritably and possibly even blushed.
“Oh, yeah, one other thing,” Dee shouted into his ear. “Did you check on John Henley-Wright?”
“Well . . . not really,” Abe admitted. “You don’t have to worry about him. He wasn’t kidnapping you.”
“How do you know?”
“I’m familiar with the guy. He’s definitely not working for UMBRA. He used to be MI-6, if you have to know. Maybe he still does some work for them. He and I have traded some information in the past—through, you know, mutual friends.”
“So you’re pretty sure he wasn’t planning to kill me, or sell me to slavers on the black market?”
“Definitely not,” Abe laughed. “He seems like a solid enough guy to me.”
“Well, in that case, he may have saved my life,” Dee admitted. “Do you think you’ll talk to him again someday?”
Abe shrugged.
“I know,” she said. “It’s none of my business. Well, if you do, then say ‘Hi and thanks from Dee Lockwood.’”
“Karen Collins,” he reminded her.
Just then they pulled up at the graphics studio.
She was disappointed to find the experience of obtaining a fake passport to be quite mundane. Abe’s contact was a cheerful thirty-something Canadian expat named Trina. She was completely lacking in the dour, suspicious angst Dee would have expected in an underworld operative. In fact, she looked bright-eyed, fun-loving, and over-caffeinated. Trina’s graphic arts studio was not a front but an honest, legal business. Dee couldn’t imagine where such a person had acquired skills in forgery or how she had come to owe Abe a favor, but it wasn’t her place to ask questions.
Trina snapped a photo of Dee in her disguise. Then she began carefully pasting the picture into an E.U. passport. Dee didn’t ask where the blank passport had come from.
“Congratulations,” Abe told her. “You’re Irish.”
“Great,” she replied. “Why don’t I have an Irish accent?”
He squinted at the ceiling, thinking. Trina called over, without looking up from her workbench, “How about: Your mother is Irish. You grew up in California, with your dad.”
Abe grinned and spread his hands. “There you go.”
In less than an hour, Trina was handing Karen Collins her new passport. “Try to keep it squashed flat for another two hours,” Trina advised her. “While the glue is curing.”
“What about the coded strip?” Dee asked.
“Already taken care of,” Abe assured her. “Don’t worry, it’s a professional job. If you’re going to have any trouble, it won’t be because of your documents.”
Dee followed him down the narrow flight of stairs to the sidewalk door.
“What a madhouse this country is,” he said, looking around the teeming streets. “Can you believe they have the bomb?”
“I thought you loved it here.”
“Oh, I do. I would move here in a second. When I say ‘madhouse,’ I don’t mean it in a bad way.” He looked at his watch. “Well, believe it or not, I’d better be going if I want to catch my plane. And I’ve got to catch that plane.”
“That’s okay. I have a busy afternoon planned.”
Abe smiled wryly. “The odyssey into your shadowy past begins,” he intoned.
“That’s about the size of it.”
“I hope you don’t uncover anything too dark.”
“I hope I do,” she replied. “That’s the whole idea.”
“Okay, I guess you know what you’re doing. Just be careful . . . And you know my number.”
They hugged, and he turned and hailed a cab. He climbed in without looking back.
Dee watched his cab disappear into traffic. She was all alone again, a hunted woman without a friend on the whole continent. She afforded herself a single sigh of self-pity. Then she cast her eye up and down the block. Two boutiques in this neighborhood had caught her eye. She was, after all, still wearing yesterday’s clothes—and she had a brand-new credit card.
Chapter 10
An hour later, Dee was getting out of an auto-rickshaw in front of Indra Software Company. She was wearing a floral cotton top with a wide neckline and a pair of teal Capri pants. Tropical elegance in a modern urban flavor. She was also toting three large and festive-looking shopping bags, in addition to her shoulder bag. The bags weren’t quite the look she was hoping for when approaching her contact at Indra, but when else would she have had time to pick up some decent clothes?
She checked her watch as she stepped out onto the sidewalk. It was a few minutes before four p.m.—perfect. It had always been Nandan Dinesh’s habit to leave work at exactly this time, and he lived the most regulated life of anyone she had ever worked with. He might as well have been made of clockwork. She planted herself just outside the main employee gate in the tall, ornate fence surrounding Indra’s sprawling downtown industrial park. Nandan should walk out within the next five minutes.
Beyond the fence, she could see the tall spires of Indra Software’s fine complex of buildings. Palisades of glass and burnished alloy: a statement of timeless elegance, fashioned for the new century. Although it was still early, a fair number of employees were already dribbling out through the security gate. Almost everyone who worked here looked frighteningly intelligent. With a population of 1.2 billion, India had more geniuses with IQs above 140 than the entire population of, say, Australia.
Nandan emerged right on time. He was a small, neat man with a brooding look, his wavy black hair cut in a style Dee recognized from 1950s TV shows, and his clothes were impeccable as always. She approached him quickly, before he could see her and think the matter over.
“Hi, Nandan.” She gave him her most charming smile.
He wrenched himself from his thoughts and immediately beamed the smile back at her. “Miss Dee!” he exclaimed. “This is a surprise and pleasure, I must say! And you have done quite a bit of shopping. Very good, that’s very good indeed.”
Then, inevitably, his brow lowered a bit as he tried to figure out what she could possibly be doing there. He stammered, “Have you perhaps returned to our country to fulfill another contract with my company?” Then he added, “Because I have not been told this is the case.”
She told him she was here to see him personally. He greeted this odd news with his usual equanimity.
Now came the hard part. Dee would need all her guile to pry Nandan away from his habitual evening’s return to his bachelor home. He was not a man who broke out of his routine easily. It took her a while, but she eventually convinced him to join her for a glass of chai and a heart-to-heart talk about the project they had jointly masterminded just over a year ago.
In the teahouse, she bought them each a tall glass of spiced and sweetened tea. He heard her out, sipping pensively at his chai. “I’m not sure if I am understanding you perfectly, Miss Dee,” he said. “You are in some kind of difficulty, is that not correct?”
“Well, you could look at it that way. But not legal trouble,” she assured him.
“I see, yes, that is very much a relief. And whatever the nature of this trouble is, Miss Dee, I understand you do not intend to share any specific information with me.”
Dee screwed her mouth to one side, hoping to suggest that that probably was a bad idea.
Nandan hastened to add, “I am not asking you to confide your troubles to me, oh dear, no! In point of fact, I think it would be wise for me to be not involved in this matter at all. This is the situation that you are describing, am I not correct? You are hoping that I will consent to tell you something confidential. While I, on my side, I shall not even know what it is that is going on.”
Dee wiggled a hand in the air equivocally. She wasn’t about to say so, but he was expressing the situation fairly precisely.
Nandan leaned back in his chair and blew out an incredulous breath. “My goodness gracious!” he said.
“I’m not going to get you in trouble,” Dee assured him, sincerely hoping it would turn out to be a fair promise. “But you still work at Indra, and I don’t. Here’s all I’m asking of you.” She leaned forward and said the next words quietly. “You and I engineered the cryptography package that secures your government’s overseas currency speculations. I was a foreign contractor. I came and went, and even while I was here, naturally, your people kept me somewhat in the dark. Now, I don’t know every little palace intrigue that has rippled through the government and military of this country. All I know is what I read in the papers. But you know. Don’t you, Nandan?”
“Oh, Miss Dee! I think you are putting me into a very strange position here, very uncomfortable indeed!”
Dee raised a hand to stop him. “I’m not asking for information,” she said firmly. “Frankly, I don’t want it. I just want to know if anything has changed, somewhere behind the scenes, that would turn me into a liability.”
Nandan blinked his large eyes blankly at her across the table, not seeming to understand. “A liability? Oh, no, Miss Dee. Your services were invaluable. Indeed, I think you could count on full-time employment with my company and a most competitive salary base . . .”
“I’m asking you if anyone in the Indian military or government might want to see me dead.”
“Dead! Goodness no! Now I am starting to think some craziness has gotten into your head.”
“What about someone at Indra Software? Or the National Treasury?”
“No, Miss Dee! I can quite reassure you. You are prey to some delusion, I think. After all, if our knowledge of the code, your knowledge and mine, was considered a serious danger, then would I not be slain before you?”
Dee nodded. That had already occurred to her. In fact, just seeing Nandan walk out the gate at his usual hour, unescorted, free as a bird, and in good health, had given her the feeling that she wouldn’t learn anything useful from him.
Her shoulders slumped. “All right,” she conceded. “I guess I was wrong.”
He sipped at his tea and regarded her over the rim of his glass with unmistakable concern. “But I am now very worried about you, Miss Dee. I am filled with regret that I cannot offer useful information. And I am sure you have already spoken with Mr. Brice Petronille.”
“Brice?” Now it was Dee’s turn to be confused. “Why would I speak with Brice?”
Nandan raised all ten fingers mincingly in the air, as if he had touched something hot. “This is certainly no business of mine! I was of the impression that you had prepared a security system for Mr. Brice Petronille.”
“It’s okay.” Dee waved away Nandan’s confusion with a breezy smile. “I did tell you that, it’s true. I wouldn’t have told very many people, but I trust you. So, what does Brice have to do with anything?”
“I am referring to his recent troubles.”
“What troubles? I haven’t heard a thing.”
“Really? If it is not impertinent, I must say I am surprised. You of all people! The matter hasn’t been on the television or in magazines but it has been the subject of so much conversation among people like ourselves.”
“I haven’t heard anything about it. What’s going on?” For a moment, Dee wondered why Abe hadn’t mentioned anything about this. Then again, she had probably never even told Abe about her contract job with Petronille.
Dee’s befuddlement must have sunk into Nandan’s brain, because his face lit up with childlike joy. “Gracious me!” he exclaimed, delighted. “You really have no idea of what I am talking about. But you are aware of Mr. Brice Petronille’s controversial website? WikiBlab.org?”
“Yes . . .” Dee said. And suddenly she had a premonition of the whole story.
Brice Petronille was a citizen of France, where he was known in the media as “Meestair Weekee.” Two years ago, he had represented himself to Dee and many other contractors, as well as to venture capitalists and government regulators, as a dot-com start-up for the dissemination of public information, in the spirit of Google or Wikipedia. He had asked her to design an unusually complex and baroque cryptographic protocol for his organization, with copies of every file stored invisibly behind layered firewalls and fractal encryption algorithms. All this in addition to a redundant network intended to withstand Trojan-horse and worm attacks of the nastiest varieties. The whole thing had struck her as paranoid—only justifiable if you were building something like an online bank, not for what he was doing. But Petronille’s business plan was innocuous and the pay was good, so she had played her little role and walked away.
A year later, the website went public under the name WikiBlab.org, offering thousands of leaked classified U.S. and E.U. documents to the public. Ever since, Meestair Weekee had been the subject of any number of investigations, audits, and indictments, but nothing seemed to stick. In the end, it appeared that he hadn’t violated any actual laws.
It had never occurred to Dee that Petronille’s legal troubles might one day affect her.
“What happened to Brice?” she asked nervously.
“It appears that he has been in hiding for, oh, many months now.”
“Hiding from what?”
“I do not know exactly, but I believe he is being persecuted by your government.”
“Prosecuted,” Dee corrected him.
“No, instruct me if my English is not correct, but I believe the word is ‘persecuted.’ According to the rumors, which of course are often wrong, he is followed and frequently stopped and questioned, and his telephones are monitored. He has been threatened with violence, and so he has taken to hiding. I heard he has moved to Switzerland.”
Dee let this information sink in. So she wasn’t the only one being pursued by mysterious agents of the U.S. government. What it meant was simple enough: she had guessed wrong—way wrong. The Indra contract was not the root of her problems. Nandan could have it right: if the U.S. government was trying to close down Wikiblab.org, they might very well try to enlist her help.
If Brice had retreated to Switzerland, he was surely living in Geneva. In the years since Europe’s massive particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider, had opened, Geneva had become the pulsing brain-center of central Europe. In Geneva, a man like Brice Petronille could surround himself with contacts and resources and sympathy.
Dee stood up, and Nandan, looking alarmed, hastily followed suit. She shook his hand in a hurry, but with great warmth. “Thank you, Nandan,” she said. “You may have helped me more than you’ll ever know.”
Nandan’s face lit up in a wide, surprised grin. “It has been entirely my pleasure.”
Dee collected her bags and hurried outside to hail a cab.
“The Taj,” she said to the driver.
“Yes madam, the Taj Hotel,” the driver repeated. He revved up the little motor of his rattly old Honda, and it lurched noisily into rush-hour traffic.
It took nearly fifteen minutes to make it across town. By then, the afternoon was beginning to wane. Light was streaking diagonally between the buildings, slicing gray and sienna shafts through the day’s accumulation of smog.
Then, when they made their final turn, the smog turned to smoke. The sidewalks outside the Taj were full of gawkers, and the street up ahead was jammed.
“Oh, my word!” the driver exclaimed, leaning forward until his nose almost touched the windshield. “I cannot believe my eyes! Madam, the Taj Hotel is on fire!”
“Stop here,” Dee said. She craned her head to the side, trying to see through the windshield. It was true: black smoke was billowing out of several windows on the fourth floor.
Ignoring the driver’s protestations, she opened her door, forcing him to come to a halt in the middle of the street. She threw a fifty-rupee note over the back of his seat, grabbed her bags, and walked away.
She shouldered into the crowd on the sidewalk, trying to make herself disappear, but being nearly a head taller than the average Indian pedestrian made this no easy feat.
Her heart was pounding—the first sign of rising panic. She tried to force her brain to stay rational, and she eyeballed the building. The fourth floor was her floor. The smoking windows faced the street. No doubt about it: her room was burning.
