23 | FIRST CLASS
The Airbus seemed to Sam to be the size of a hotel. He was amazed that it could get off the ground and was secretly glad when it did, although he feigned complete nonchalance as the nose lifted and the rumble of the runway ceased.
According to the information tucked in with the in-flight magazines, the plane was as long as sixteen elephants standing trunk to tail. He struggled for a moment to visualize that and eventually decided that it was quite a herd. Certainly larger than the only other plane he had ever been on, which was the CDD Learjet. That couldn’t have been much more than a couple of elephants long at most.
Special Agent Tyler had met them in the parking lot entrance of the building as they had hurried to leave.
“You’re on a commercial flight,” he’d said. “Leaving at ten p.m. We’ve only got two Learjets available, and we’re using them both for Tactical. I’ll see you in Chicago.”
Sitting now in the luxury of the huge plane, Sam let his mind wander. He wondered if elephants were the international standard for measuring planes and whether they were Indian elephants or African elephants, which he seemed to remember were bigger.
The field kits traveled with them in the overhead lockers, as Dodge refused to entrust them to the baggage handlers.
They had special tags that got them through airport security unopened, so Sam had not yet seen what was inside them.
The Airbus finished climbing and flattened out into a smooth and level flight. An illuminated seat-belt sign switched off with a quiet ping.
Sam looked around. There were just four seats in this part of the first-class cabin. Two of them, on the other side of a frosted glass panel, were occupied by a couple of important-looking executives, or maybe diplomats. If they wondered what a couple of teenagers were doing in the other half of the cabin, they didn’t show it by look or gesture.
The flight attendant, a pleasant lady with dark hair pulled back in a tight bun, was suddenly at his side. He hadn’t noticed her approach.
“Would you like a headset, sir?” she asked. “We have regular or neuro.”
Sam tried to remember the last time he had been called “sir” and couldn’t. He smiled and shook his head. She asked Dodge the same question and got the same answer, then moved over to the other side of the cabin.
Dodge stood up and extracted his field kit—a silver briefcase with a digital lock—from the luggage compartment.
“It’s your first field mission,” Dodge said. “So I’d better show you the ropes.”
Dodge showed him the key code and opened the briefcase.
Inside the case was a collection of tools, some of which Sam recognized at once and others that he could not identify.
“Right,” Dodge said, “we’ll start with the disclone.”
He pulled out a black device with a long cable attached. The cable disappeared into a slot inside the briefcase. “Before we touch a thing, we clone their hard disk. Tactical will have already rendered the computer casing safe, removed any explosives or other booby traps—”
“Explosives?” Sam asked nervously.
“Pretty common,” Dodge said. “To destroy any evidence on the hard drives. But don’t worry about that—Tactical are specialists at that kind of thing. Once they’ve finished taking out the terrorists and dealing with any physical booby traps, then we go in. And the first thing we do is clone the drive so that if there are any software destructs or suicide code, then we get a second chance at it. Remove the drive from the computer, plug it into the disclone, and it will mirror the contents, bit for bit, byte for byte, on an internal drive in the briefcase. Clear?”
“Clear,” Sam said.
Dodge went through the rest of the gear in the case, explaining the use and the operation of each device. It took about half an hour and was far more interesting, Sam thought, than any in-flight movie.
The cabin attendant—her name badge said MARIE— brought them some refreshments at one stage, just a soda and a choice of profiteroles. Dodge closed the case while she hovered and opened it again when she left.
“So what do you think about the phantom?” Sam asked when the lesson was over. “What’s your theory?”
“The beast of the moors.” Dodge grinned. “The hound of the Baskervilles.”
“Eh?”
“Gummi Bear will tell you that there’s some kind of creature roaming the network, a monster, a demon from the depths of the Internet.”
“More of an angel than a demon,” Sam said.
“Ain’t that the truth,” Dodge said. “Another theory is that it’s a coding freak. Someone with immense power and skills.”
“Are there really people like that?” Sam asked. “Coding freaks?”
“There are. I’ve met two of them … well”—he wavered—“one for definite and one I’m not sure about yet.”
“Who?” Sam asked eagerly.
“Swamp Witch,” Dodge said. “She’s a freak.”
“What do you mean?”
“In this business, we do our best work before the age of twenty-two. After that, the brain begins to slow down, partly from the pressure and partly from old age.”
“At twenty-two?”
“Yup. But every now and then, a person comes along who doesn’t burn out and whose mind stays razor sharp year after year. A freak of nature. A natural. Someone who can do this stuff without thinking, without training. That’s Swamp Witch. They say she can do magic.”
“So could she be the phantom?”
“Don’t think I ain’t thought about it,” Dodge said. “If there’s anyone who could throw some lizard gizzards in a boiling pot and make a magic potion, it’s her. But she was right behind us when it happened. She couldn’t have done it.”
“Who else, then?”
“Maybe there’s another agency out there. Someone like us.”
“The Easter Bunny?” Sam asked.
“Could be,” Dodge said. “Or maybe our counterparts in another country.”
“Nothing quite adds up, when I think about it,” Sam said. “It’s hard to believe that another country could be that far ahead of us.”
“What’re you saying?” Dodge asked.
“I have my own theory.”
“Go on.”
“Well, the intruder code disintegrated, and we’re all assuming that it got blasted by someone. But what if it just self-destructed?”
“Why suddenly self-destruct when you’ve just won the battle?”
“Unless the person who hit the Self-Destruct button was there in the room with us at the time.”
“Are you serious?”
“Dodge, you can’t mention this to anyone inside the CDD,” Sam said. “No one, okay?”
“Okay,” Dodge agreed, looking at him closely.
“What if the terrorists had an insider at CDD? They’d know all our procedures; they’d know our response patterns, how we react, what we’d be likely to do, even what defense mechanisms we have at our disposal. It’s certainly more likely than some fantasy about a phantom on the Internet.”
“But this insider didn’t know about the plane?”
“Yep—that’s my theory,” Sam said. “Maybe the plane attack had two goals: to eliminate us, and to silence the insider. The only person who could identify the terrorists.”
“So when the insider realized what was going on, he or she hit the Self-Destruct key,” Dodge said. “Why the delay, though? Cut it a bit fine. If we hadn’t DoSed the UAS, then we’d be toast by now and so would the insider. Why wait until the last minute?”
“I’m not sure,” Sam said.
Dodge said, “If it was one of us, then who?”
“I don’t know,” Sam admitted.
“The security cams would have recorded everything. I’ll call Jaggard and ask him to review the footage.”
He reached for the airphone.
Sam put a hand on his arm, stopping him. “If there’s a traitor inside CDD,” he said, picking his words carefully, “how do you know it’s not Jaggard?”
“I don’t. How do you know it’s not me?”
“I don’t. But I didn’t know who else to talk to.”
“Okay, we’ll check it ourselves when we get back. I’ll hack into the security system so that we don’t have to formally request access.”
Sam nodded. “That’s what I was thinking.”
“I can’t believe it’s Jaggard, though,” Dodge said. “I’ve known him a long time.”
“Who, then? Kiwi? Vienna? Gummi?”
Dodge said, “I don’t know. There’s no reason to suspect any of them. Nor Socks or Zombie.”
“Or even Swamp Witch,” Sam said slowly.
The plane banked slightly, and through the window, Sam could see a dark scar on the desert: a ruined city, crushed and blackened buildings emanating from a huge crater.
Dodge saw him looking.
“Vegas,” Dodge said. “Not easy to look at, is it?”
Sam shook his head.
“Better get some kip,” Dodge said, settling in for a nap. “It might be your last chance for a while.”
The seat folded flat and was surprisingly comfortable, although quite narrow and not quite long enough for Sam’s legs. He couldn’t sleep, though, and after a while, he asked Marie for a neuro-headset and watched old cowboy movies inside his head as the sixteen-elephant-long flying hotel glided smoothly over darkened Midwest states.
Later, in the dim light of the cabin, with the rush of the wind outside just a warm cocoon of noise enveloping him, he remembered to ask.
“Dodge. You still awake?”
“Am now.”
“Sorry.”
“Don’t be. What is it?”
“You said you had met two freaks in your life. One was Swamp Witch. Who was the other?”
“You,” Dodge replied sleepily. “Good night, Sam.”