the gentlemanly thing as he pressed her for a decision.
“I’m afraid it’s judgment day, my sweet,” he said, close to her ear. “We need to have a meeting of the minds. Because we’re due at a couple of very high-level engagements and I have to be sure you don’t pose a danger to yourself or others.”
Jane turned her head so that her temple almost touched his lips. “That,” she observed, eyes downcast, “would be the definition of insanity.”
“That would be a get-into-Leavenworth-free card. Insanity is more a matter of violating societal norms. If you accept the new normal – no problem.”
Jane turned to face him as he donned a checkered muffler. “What am I missing? I need a job, but you hardly need my buy-in. You have the world on a string. What’s your angle, James?”
“I?” James objected facetiously. “Have an angle? I am but a servant of the people. Or at any rate, a very demanding, privileged, and elite fraction thereof. And I am shocked, yes shocked by your suspicion. Wounded to the very core.” For a brief moment he grew serious. “Your departure left quite a hole in our operations. To say nothing of my heart. Did you think you were not missed? I’ve been to the ends of the earth and back again, and I’m here to tell you – there’s no one quite like Jane.”
Jane dropped a glove. James picked it up and, in giving it back, took her hand and pressed a kiss upon her naked wrist. Jane did not object.
“I see. Mistakes were made and lessons have been learned.” Jane spoke with a blithe tone of unbelief that James seemed to find infectious.
“And order has been restored. The world is our oyster. Nothing but blue skies from now on.” The flight attendant opened the exterior door and several uniformed guards entered and stood at attention as James ushered Jane toward the exit. “Did I mention the signing bonus?” he asked pleasantly as he marched her down the steps and through the frigid pre-dawn toward a white Humvee flanked by armed MPs.
22 Blindsided
Having driven through the night, a fatigued and frazzled John and Jen dropped the car at the fringes of a packed metro parking lot. Weaving their way through and against an unusually heavy flow of foot traffic, a massive wave of humanity seemingly intent on flooding into DC, they hiked the short but bone chilling distance to a nearby Arlington coffee shop. Washing up on the doorstep an hour before opening, they were nonetheless admitted by the Korean-American owner, stout, wild-haired, and covered in flour.
“What is it, all of five o’clock?” Jen marveled, rubbing her hands together and hugging herself to restore some warmth. “And cold as a Wall Street bankster’s so-called heart. Man, you can tell today is the day.”
“Can’t really blame them,” Nick sighed.
“Let’s just say I wish I couldn’t. And – mmmm – smells like history is not the only thing being made today. Our friend Nick here is a triple threat, I’ll have you know. He hacks, he is one with the coffee bean, and the man can cook.”
Nick blushed a little and pursed his lips like a bearer of bad tidings. “Chunky monkey scones.”
Jen feigned a swoon. “Some people long for virgins in the afterlife. I just want a chunky monkey scone.”
“If you insist on being nutty as a fruitcake, I figure it’s the least I can do,” Nick said. “What’s your poison?” he asked John.
“Large coffee?” John supposed.
Jen spoke soothingly to Nick, “He’s being polite.” Addressing John she said gently, “Would you ask da Vinci to paint by numbers? Make it a double red eye, light cream. I’ll have –“
“Sugar-free caramel macchiato, extra dry, no whip,” Nick finished. “Outta here, we deliver.” He shooed them toward the kitchen.
Passing rapidly through the kitchen, a blur of stainless steel and cracked linoleum, Jen went straight into the cooler, John on her heels. She swung open a set of aluminum shelves at the rear and hit a button on a nearby thermostat. In response, the back wall slid away to reveal a short staircase leading to an otherwise hidden section of basement.
“Sweet!” John said.
“Panic room,” Jen replied.
“North Koreans?”
“Jewish mother.”
Jen led the way downstairs to a neat, almost monastic hacker’s paradise. As their eyes adjusted to the meager blue light, Nick came after them, bearing steaming hot drinks and a paper bag of scones.
“T minus 20, angelpie,” he said.
“We don’t have to chase them down?” Jen marveled.
“It’s the economy, stupid. They’ve been cashing in those teaser coupons for over a week. Today is free drink day and – “ Nick held up his cell phone, one foot on the stairs, “they already texted their order.” He ascended to the cooler and the wall slid closed.
As John gulped and munched, Jen hunched over a notebook computer. One end of the room was set aside for a tidy army cot and plastic storage crates containing regiments of books, CDs, and DVDs. James Carroll’s “House of War” lay open, face down, on the white pillow. The rest of the room was arranged around a series of desks and equipment racks meticulously crammed with hardware, including multiple monitors, hard-drive stacks, a half dozen or so servers, assorted network hubs, wired and wireless routers, bundles of cables, a DJ tower, and a huge flat-screen TV.
“Should I be seeing this?” John wondered aloud, setting down his coffee and picking up the book.
“None of us is getting out alive, Mary Poppins. Check your warranty.”
“I’ve never played on this side of the street before.”
“Who has?” Jen said. “We’re not in Kansas any more and you can’t exactly Google map it. Look, if you’re a rat, Nick and I are toast. And speaking of bread…” She stood up and beckoned to John to take her place.
Sitting down, John looked at the screen. Looked at her. Then looked back at the screen. “Is that -?”
“Money? You bet your moral compass it is. Ill-gotten gains in secret bank accounts, to be precise. Easier to show than tell. Ya know what they say – one picture…”
“Is worth a million,” John chimed in. “Or a billion –“
“Yeah,” Jen said patiently. “That all?” She stood poised, waiting.
“Well, it looks like a spreadsheet. Dates, names –“ He ran a finger down the left side of the screen.
“3 – 2 – 1,” Jen did a NASA countdown, softly.
“Holy fucking shit!” John exclaimed.
Jen signaled a football score with both arms. “Houston, we have liftoff!” She immediately sat down at another keyboard and began typing furiously.
“I voted for that guy. And that guy. Almost smoked that guy.” He pointed to the screen.
Over her shoulder, Jen threw him a sweet smile. “And now there they are, all on the same page. Lions - and lamb chops.”
“Not to mention elephants and donkeys. Where’d you get this stuff?”
Jen raised one shoulder evasively, “Here and there.” Then, deciding full disclosure was the best policy, she admitted, “OK, THIS is copied from the DNI collector system – Department of National Intelligence? Yeah. Which siphoned it off the SWIFT international interbank system - what some have called the Rosetta stone of financial data. Repository of all top echelon business transactions, emails, contracts, you name it.”
John ruminated on that. “Soooo - basically what you’re telling me, showing me,” he amended, “is that the world economy is being run as a vast criminal enterprise?”
“Well, “ Jen temporized, “I don’t think we have any data on China. Yet. But – yeah, pretty much.”
“This is, this is –“ John tried to describe the sensation of having your brain explode, but words failed him.
“Incendiary? Seismic? Earth-shattering?” The monitor in front of her began to ping gently and pulse with a green light. “Apocalyptic, maybe? I suppose now would be as good a time as any to say that they traced a copy of THAT through a router at your h
ouse. What used to be your house.”
John’s jaw dropped further. “Wait, wait, wait. What?!”
Jen winced. “Yeah. My bad. On the other hand,” she changed the subject with a forced cheeriness worthy of Shirley Temple, “based on the current coordinates of the cell phone that last contacted yours (which I can deduce because it is the only unidentified phone at our current location), I believe I have just located your wife. And burner or no, you really need to disable that GPS.”
Almost knocking Jen sideways in his haste to check on Jane, John said roughly, “Remind me to strangle you later. Is she OK? Got a visual? Is it live?”
Jen nodded and rubbed her bruised elbow. “Mere moments away as the dodo flies. In the lap of luxury, I might add. Jacked their security feed. Ah, the joys of mass surveillance in the morning.” They watched Jane exit the white Humvee and walk into a very large, very white house.
“Why do I get the feeling that there’s a good news, bad news joke in here somewhere?” John asked.
“The good news is, she’s alive,” Jen replied. “The bad news is, she has somehow found her way to ground zero.” She pointed at the mansion on the screen - or what little of it they could see. “New World Order, DC branch. Plutocracy on the Potomac.”
“Not laughing my ass off here. That’s where your secret society lives?” he managed to look both skeptical and worried.
“More like where they tend to congregate when they’re stateside, its political, and they want to avoid the limelight. Financial