Shortly before its takedown by the FBI and other agencies, a small number of security researchers and law enforcement officials around the world had been noticing an unusual advert appearing intermittently in the services section of the Silk Road, the notorious criminal marketplace hidden deep within the Tor network. The advert was simple.

As it didn’t offer malware, credit card hash dumps, hard drugs, weapons, or child pornography, most researchers moved on to more tempting targets. Besides, it wasn’t a permanent feature, popping up a few days every month or two before once again disappearing. With other, more nefarious sorts to deal with, no one charged with policing the Internet who bothered to read it when it did crop up considered the character they dubbed “Sealion” to be much of a threat.

Despite being one of the smaller departments of state, everyone who worked in the unimposing building at the far end of Whitehall knew that the current minister was rather proud of his position. Therefore, violating any of the myriad of rules with which he ran his office was something none of his staff dared to do unless they were prepared to deal with the ire of his ever-vigilant gatekeeper, Terri Campbell, or the unbridled wrath of Edward Telford, the minister’s permanent undersecretary and attack dog. This was why the minister was quite taken aback when Bryan Morton, his director of communications and perhaps the most risk-averse member of his staff, paid no heed whatsoever to Terri Campbell’s effort to stop Morton as he rushed past her desk and burst into the minister’s office without so much as knocking.

Even before Telford, who had been preparing the minister for a meeting with the PM later that afternoon, could utter a single word, Morton had slammed the door behind him and started pacing back and forth in front of the minister’s desk.

For his part, the minister could only stare at Morton with an expression that quickly changed from utter shock to red-faced rage.

“We’ve got a problem,” Morton muttered as he spun about and retraced his steps without bothering to look up at either the minister or Telford.

“You’re bloody right we’ve got a problem,” Telford growled. “To start with…”

Coming to a sudden stop, Morton ignored Telford as he stared at the minister. “The Sun is about to run a story that’s going to make what Anthony Weiner did look tame.”

The minister’s earlier anger turned to confusion. “Who the hell is Anthony Weiner?”

Setting aside his surprise over the minister’s inability to associate that name to the scandal in New York that had put a quick and ignoble end to an otherwise promising political career, Telford glanced over at his political master. “He’s a former American congressman who was caught using a private Twitter account to solicit sex with women.”

When he saw the vacant look on the minister’s face, Morton assumed the man known to be something of a Luddite had no idea what a Twitter account was. Eager to show off his expertise when it came to enlightening the technologically challenged, Morton began to explain without bothering to wait for the minister to ask him. “It’s a microblogging service—”

He was cut short as the minister slammed his fist down. “I damn well know what Twitter is,” he snapped. “What’s that and this American got to do with me?”

Never having managed to develop the thick hide a member of the minister’s staff needed to withstand the scathing vitriol the minister often unleashed on those who were foolish enough to arouse his ire, Morton drew back. By the time he had managed to mentally regroup, he found himself facing two men who were on the verge of verbally skinning him alive. “I just got off the phone with a friend of mine over at the Sun,” Morton began quickly before either man had a chance to lash out. “He told me a journalist named Sue Oliver is working on a story that links the minister to a Twitter account used to post invitations to young girls.”

Frowning and without taking the time to think, the minister blurted out the first thing that popped into his head. “What kind of invitations?”

Shooting Telford a quick sideways glance, which was returned blandly, Morton hesitated as he waited for Telford to inform their boss of the obvious. When he saw the career bureaucrat had no intention of doing so, the young technocrat drew in a deep breath. “Invitations to have sex with him — I mean you, Minister.”

Dumbfounded, the minister blinked furiously as he gave his head a quick shake. “That’s preposterous!”

“That’s what I said,” Morton replied.

“Did this friend of yours bother to tell you how Sue Oliver managed to find these tweets?” Telford asked as the minister was recovering from Morton’s stunning revelation.

“There are no such tweets!” the minister snapped as he rounded on Telford.

Before responding, Telford took a moment to study the minister. Whereas the minister tended to think in terms of black and white, Telford knew they lived in a world composed of various shades of gray, a world where even a politician who strove to be as pure as the driven snow all too often gave in to the temptation to use tactics and his position to achieve ends that were less than honorable. Suspecting something was afoot, he turned his full attention back to Morton. “Get back in touch with this friend of yours and find out all you can about Sue Oliver’s sources and their reliability.”

Nodding, Morton looked over at the minister, waiting to be dismissed.

Telford sighed. “Today, Bryan, if you don’t mind,” he muttered.

“Oh, yes, right.” With that, the harried young communications director spun about and beat a hasty retreat.

“And you?” the minister asked as he turned his attention to his principal advisor — a man he hoped would help him in his bid to be promoted to one of the more prestigious departments.

Before answering, Telford came to his feet. “Whilst our eager young technocrat is running around, flapping his wings about like a headless chicken, I think it might be best if I kicked over a few rocks to see what I can find out about this Twitter account Oliver claims you have.”

“There is no such account,” the minister snapped. “Anyone who says there is one is lying.”

Knowing it was an exercise in futility to argue with the minister when his knickers were in a twist, Telford excused himself. Making his way to his own office, he retrieved the pay-as-you-go mobile from the locked drawer of his desk, one he used whenever he needed to make a discreet call. After informing his secretary he’d be out for a while, he headed for the door without telling her or anyone else where he was going. Whereas Morton would go about making his enquiries with all the finesse of a bull charging a red cape, Telford’s contacts understood the need for discretion.

Despite having spent far too much of his youth wandering around the damp streets of Belfast with hair down to his collar, a Browning pistol nestled down the back of his jeans, and a barely passable Irish accent, Edward Telford had never before set foot across the very unobtrusive threshold of the Special Forces Club. An elderly but still very trim porter with startling sapphire eyes greeted him with careful courtesy at the door and enquired after his business.

“I have a meeting with Andy Webb.”

“Ah, you’ve been expected, sir. Please wait here.” With a small smile, the porter vanished in search of Edward’s host.

Left with nothing better to do, Telford took to studying the black-and-white photos of SOE agents that lined the walls of the entrance hall. In pride of place a posed picture of a stunning young woman with dark hair and haunting eyes drew his attention. Beneath it, a discreet brass plaque gave little more than the beauty’s name, Violette Szabo, and then two simple letters, GC.

“I expect you know her story,” a soft-spoken voice just behind his shoulder mused, causing Telford to nearly jump.

After managing to settle himself, Telford turned and offered his hand to his old friend Andy Webb, a man who, despite his age, still had the ability to move with a feline subtleness. Telford concluded as he reflected ruefully upon his own receding hairline and spreading paunch that other than a few more lines at the corners of his eyes and a touch of gray around the temples, Webb had changed little over the last thirty years.

“I’ve heard some of the stories concerning her,” Telford admitted.

“She put our little adventures firmly in the shade,” Andy replied as he took a moment to glance at the photo with the sort of reverence a soldier affects when reflecting upon a comrade. After a moment of silence, Andy turned his full attention back to Telford, sporting a gentle smile that reminded him of some of the more entertaining instances of their shared past before he was gripped firmly by the arm and escorted into the bar.

Within a few minutes, the two men had settled in a quiet corner under the stern gaze of “Wild Bill” Donovan. Both took a moment to savor the large Bushmills in front of them before Andy decided to cut to the chase. “So whilst it’s always lovely to see you, Edward, what has led a senior Whitehall mandarin to seek me out in the middle of the day and honor me with his company?”

Telford toyed with his glass for a moment before posing his question. “I gather you’re now something of a specialist in dealing with cybercrimes and hackers.”

Andy stared for a moment before bursting out laughing. “Cyber? Do you mean that someone in Her Majesty’s government is actually becoming interested enough in finding out what it really means, rather than just trotting out the word cyber like some magic talisman with a budget attached?”

Telford failed to share Andy’s laughter. Instead, he paused uncomfortably, still staring into the depths of his glass. “My minister has a little problem we need some help with.” He paused, struggling to overcome the ingrained habits he had developed over the years to protect and serve politicians and senior government officials, often from their own miscalculations or stupidity. “It’s of a personal nature.”

The look on his old friend’s face abruptly stilled the mirth that had been bubbling in Andy Webb’s eyes. “Tell me about it.”

For the next ten minutes, Telford haltingly revealed everything he knew whilst Andy sat silent and still before him. When at last he came to a shuddering halt, he paused, gulped down the rest of the fiery liquid he had been cradling, and asked a question he was not sure he wanted to hear the answer to. “Is it feasible?”

Unsure, Andy asked a question of his own. “That he did it?”

“No! That he’s been set up.”

“God yeah!” Andy proclaimed louder than Telford cared for before launching into a description of the most likely attack vectors, stopping only when he noticed Telford’s eyes were glazing over. Pausing, he took a moment to recalibrate his pitch, switching to nontechnical phraseology he expected even a former Guards officer like Telford would be able to follow. Only after seeing his renewed efforts were still not gaining any traction, Andy sighed as he abandoned the effort and turned his attention instead to more practical matters. “If we’ve any hope of sorting this out, I’m going to need all his home computers, laptops, tablets, and personal phones. In fact, everything he touches that has a processor, every storage device, every login, and every password for every account.”

Telford frowned. “He’s not going to like that.”

Leaning forward, Andy locked eyes with Telford. “Got a better idea, mate?”

Telford’s shoulders drooped. “I’ll persuade him.”

“I also want a letter of authorization,” Andy added as his voice took on a more ominous tone while he was easing back in his seat.

“Why?”

“Protection. People tend to get a bit twitchy about ministers’ computers. There’s the Computer Misuse Act, RIPA, and a host of other bits of legislation that any god-fearing investigator can swiftly fall foul of, especially since the Leveson inquiry. I’ll send you a draft for him to sign.”

By now, Telford’s shoulders were slumped in utter defeat. Then a thought occurred to him. “I don’t want anyone else to know what you’re up to.”

“Sorry, mate. I’m going to need some help on this if you want it done right and you want it done fast,” Andy snapped even as he was holding his hand up to forestall the objection he saw forming on Telford’s lips. “You’ve no need to worry about Tommy. He’s cleared, and I trust him.”

Realizing he was in no position to object, Telford conceded the point before moving on to his next concern. “How fast can you complete your investigation?”

“Give me a week. Oh, yeah, and as to my fee, it’s eleven hundred a day and a future favor when I need it. Do we have a deal?”

Telford sighed as he nodded reluctantly, too battered to even try to bicker over the day rate. “Seeing as I’ve little choice but to say yes, the least you can do is treat me to another Bushmills, a large one this time, if you please.”

Edward Telford was not in the habit of visiting the offices of second-tier staffers. Whenever he had the need to discuss something with them, they trooped into his office like obedient schoolchildren summoned by the headmaster. So when, almost a week since his meeting with Andy Webb, he nonchalantly wandered into the cubbyhole Bryan Morton thought of as an office, the young director of communications knew he was about to be treated to a right royal bollocking.

After closing the door and settling into the only other chair in Morton’s office, Telford fixed the nervous young man with a stare that would ordinarily have caused him to fidget. He didn’t, however, for he knew why the minister’s chief advisor was there and was more than prepared to stand his ground.

“I’m not going to ask you why you chose to set up an interview for the minister with the BBC without first going through me,” Telford declared with a strained airiness.

Determined to defend his decision to talk the minister into launching a preemptive media strike, Morton drew himself up. “The minister happens to agree with me.” Wisely, the young man stopped short of adding, for a change.

“Sue Oliver’s story isn’t a story — not yet, at least,” Telford countered. “Even if her editors do decide to run with it, it won’t be on the front page. Oliver is a hack. She’s the kind of journalist who makes the paparazzi look good.”

“While that may be true, if we don’t get out there ahead of this before it’s a story, the opposition will hammer us once the Sun runs it. When that happens, we’ll be on defense, which these days, with 24-7 media and bloggers, is not where we want to be.”

“Respond is the operative word here,” Telford growled in the menacing tone he used to cow errant staffers. “We respond with the full story, one that not only provides the public with the facts but presents the minister as the victim of a vicious attack orchestrated by his political foes using a fraudulent Web account.”

“Is he an innocent victim?” Morton asked rhetorically.

Rather than answering him, Telford came to his feet. “Call whoever it is you’re talking to at the BBC and cancel the interview. While Oliver’s story might be printed in the Sun, I repeat, might be printed, you can rest assured an interview in which a minister claims he is the hapless victim of character assassination without a shred of evidence to support that claim will be on the front page of every newspaper in the country.” With that, Telford headed out of the room, stopping by his own office only long enough to let his secretary know he had some personal business he needed to attend to. He didn’t, of course, at least not personal business that was his. Like so much else he did, the personal business he took care of was the minister’s. In this case, it was running the source of the Twitter account to ground.

When he was once more alone in his cubbyhole, Morton took to brooding. Convinced his approach to the minister’s problem was the only way to handle it and determined to prove himself to the rest of the staff, as soon as he was sure Telford was gone, Morton called Jenny Jones’s production assistant at the BBC to confirm the time he needed to have the minister at the studio for his interview. And rather than run the risk of being interrupted by Telford, Morton decided to wait until he was alone in the car with the minister and heading over to the studio to go over the notes he was preparing for him.

On the other side of town, Telford once again found himself clutching a large Bushmills beneath the photo of “Wild Bill” Donovan. Only this time, Andy Webb had brought a colleague along. Whereas Andy was slim and unprepossessing, his colleague looked like a cross between a New York fire hydrant and a British bulldog, creating something of contrast to come to mind as the image of Little and Large popped into his head.

“Tommy, this is Edward. Edward, Tommy Tyler.” Andy made the introductions as Telford cautiously offered his hand across the table, only to find it brutally gripped in a grubby paw and pumped with all the finesse of a jackhammer whilst Tommy’s mouth took off with equal speed.

“Pleased to meet you, Eddie. Andy said the two of you served together in Ireland.” Then, without pausing, Tommy pitched headlong into the issue at hand. “Well, it seems your man’s been well and truly stitched. At first sight, he’s as guilty as sin.”

Baffled, Telford took a quick glance over at Andy before turning his full attention back to Tommy. “Excuse me?”

Whilst Telford was painfully aware that not everyone saw the need to gently open a difficult conversation as carefully as senior civil servants were wont to do, the speed of Tommy’s verbal tsunami left him shell-shocked as the stout little Welshman blithely ploughed ahead.

“I did say at first sight,” Tommy emphasized before pausing to catch his breath and take a sip of his beer. “All I can say is thank God for backups. At least your man did something right. Anyway…”

At this point, Andy placed a hand on his colleague’s arm in an effort to arrest Tommy’s runaway diatribe. “What Tommy is saying is that it’s just as you suspected. The minister was very professionally set up, after which the bad guys did a wonderful job of making it appear that they had never been there.”

“Can you tell me how you were able to confirm this?”

At the question, Tommy necked down the rest of his pint, set his glass aside, and grinned. “’Cos they’re not as good as me, that’s why,” Tommy proclaimed proudly. “Like I said, thank God for backups, ’cos they’d pretty much left his laptop cleaner than a pig’s whistle, apart from all the dodgy accounts and photos, of course.”

Sensing his colleague was about to launch into a deep technical description of his own cleverness, Andy quickly caught his attention with a crisp twenty-pound note and asked Tommy if he’d mind going to the bar for refills, hoping that whilst he was doing so, he could explain the basics to Telford in terms he would be able to understand.

Taking his cue, Tommy snatched up the note and left.

Andy explained, “The minister backed up his computer from time to time and then, thankfully, disconnected the backup drive. As a result, we were able to re-create previous states of his laptop. What we found wasn’t pretty. It all started with an innocent e-mail complaining about a planning application he’d received from a constituent who we’ll call Mr. Angry. Attached was a nice little PDF containing the local council minutes, as well as something a tad nastier. Just to be thorough, we tracked it back. Mr. Angry does exist, but he never sent the e-mail the minister received.”

“Anyway, he was well and truly rooted,” Tommy proclaimed as he barged back into the conversation even as he dumped fresh drinks on the table. “Rooted, key logger, control of the camera, microphone, the bloody works,” he declared with an almost childish relish.

“The works?” Telford asked as he turned to Andy for a translation.

Andy cleared his throat apologetically. “Let’s just say you might advise the minister not to sit in front of his laptop wearing nothing more than his vest and underpants in the future,” he said, even as he tapped a bulging brown envelope on the table, now dampened by Tommy’s beer.

“Show me.”

“Here?”

“On second thought, I can wait,” Telford mumbled as he struggled to purge a horrid image out of his mind and turn his full attention back to the issue at hand. “Who did it?”

“No idea, mate, but—” Tommy paused as if a stray thought had suddenly occurred to him even as he was ignoring the not-so-gentle jabs of his boss under the table. “Has he been pissing off the Syrians?”

Telford in turn snorted with laughter. “He’s not FCO, much as he’d like to be, and the Syrians don’t have any votes in his constituency. Why do you ask?”

“The malware we came across reported back to a C&C server in Cyprus that just may have links with the Syrian Electronic Army.”

Telford turned for a further translation to a decidedly uncomfortable-looking Andy.

“It looks like the attack was staged through Cyprus by someone with links to the Syrian Electronic Army who are a bunch of pro-Assad hackers,” Andy explained.

“And you know that because?” Telford asked warily as he and Andy turned their attention back to a suddenly blushing Tommy.

“I took a quick peek.”

“I don’t want to hear this,” Telford muttered as he squirmed about in his seat before sitting up sharply. “At the moment, all I’m interested in is clearing the minister of this excrement and stopping it from happening again in the future,” he snapped.

“Oh, that’s easy,” Tommy replied, paying no heed at all to Telford’s sharp retort. “Well, stopping it in the future, anyway. You need to tell your minister he needs to patch regularly, get a decent antivirus package like Norton, don’t open unexpected docs or click on embedded links, and, most importantly, don’t use the same password for everything.”

“He had antivirus,” Telford interjected. “He spent the better part of a day going about, bragging to everyone who would listen about how he downloaded it for free.”

Tommy snorted into his beer whilst even Andy looked on, making no effort to hide his grin. “You get what you pay for, Eddie,” Tommy added before taking a long pull on his pint.

“But it was still supposed to protect him from viruses and hackers!” Telford snapped.

“He wasn’t the only one attacked,” Tommy blurted, unaware he was digging an even deeper hole with his peace offering.

Even as Tommy opened his mouth to continue, a sharp kick to his shin put paid to whatever further comments he was about to make. Instead, Andy posed a question to Telford, ignoring the reproachful look of his colleague.

“It’s like this, Edward. Think of the Internet as a battlefield.”

Telford nodded cautiously.

“Like any soldier who’s switched on, it’s a good idea to wear body armor when you’re outside the wire. Right?”

“That makes sense,” he agreed.

“As Tommy said, you get what you pay for,” Andy concluded as a ghost of a smile tugged at the corners of his lips. “And even then, you still have to know when to duck,” he quickly added before taking a sip of his drink.

For a long moment, Telford considered this bit of military wisdom before returning once more to his goal. “I trust you have evidence to support all this.”

“We do.”

“Will it stand up in court if necessary?”

“We worked to legal forensic standards. It’s bombproof, unlike the minister’s laptop.”

Early the next day, having pieced together the plan he would use to dispose of the problem that Sue Oliver’s story had created by relying on the same care and meticulous approach he had always employed in such instances, Telford settled into addressing the next challenge he needed to deal with — the early morning traffic on the M4.

Ignoring the antics of the frustrated drivers around him, he once more went over just how things would play out. Avoiding a scandal that would bring a promising political career to a screeching halt would all come down to a simple matter of timing and wording. With the information Andy had provided him, Telford planned on crafting a statement exposing the fraud being used to sully the minister’s reputation that he would have one of his associates, someone who was not on the minister’s staff, release. By using another agency to put the word out, one the public expected to deal with such crimes, the minister’s name would simply be one of many mentioned in the statement rather than being the banner headline. Though he expected the press would ask the minister to comment on the sordid affair, Telford was confident that even an idiot like Morton would be able to handle that. The man, after all, was supposed to be the director of communications, a charter he had thus far demonstrated little of the sort of adroitness Telford expected from members of the staff he oversaw.

Satisfied all was in order, Telford checked the time, rebuking himself when he saw he had missed the top-of-the-hour news. Reaching out, he switched on the radio with the volume down and listened for a moment, just to be sure his teenaged daughter and her friends hadn’t fiddled with the stations the night before. Upon hearing the voice of the BBC newsreader, Telford turned the volume back up and settled back to listen while he slogged his way into the heart of London along with the countless others inching their way along the motorway sporting expressions better suited to the cast of a zombie flick than the entrepreneurs, investment bankers, solicitors, office staff, and government bureaucrats who ran the nation.

It took him several seconds before he realized what Jenny Jones, a political commentator and presenter for the BBC, was talking about.

“I imagine when you are covering a story like this, you must be careful, lest you do damage to the reputations of the people mentioned in a story, as well as your own,” Jones intoned in that voice people at the Beeb thought made them sound as if they were intelligent.

“That’s right, Jenny,” the woman interviewee replied. “I am a firm believer in the need to get a story absolutely right rather than being first out of the blocks with it.”

Unable to help himself, Telford scoffed. “Bollocks!”

“It was for that reason and the damage the minister’s reputation would suffer that I held back running with the story concerning the sexting messages he sent out to a number of young girls,” the interviewee continued.

The words minister and sexting caused Telford to involuntarily lurch forward.

“I wasn’t going to run with the story until I had an opportunity to chat with the two girls, a college student and a former campaign volunteer, who claim they had received sextings from the minister. Your interview with the minister in the last hour in which he denied he knew anything about the ‘Minister-O-Luv’ account, however, left me little choice but to come forward with what I already know.”

“Did these messages include photos?”

“Yes, a number of them, none of which show the minister’s face.”

“Then how do you know it was the minister?”

“The background. One clearly shows the entrance to the ministry along with its address, and the other was actually taken inside his office. Unfortunately, they are of such a nature that I cannot use them in my story.”

With nothing better to do as he waited for the traffic to move, Keith Richards took to looking around. To his surprise, the red-faced middle-aged man in the Volvo Estate next to him was furiously pounding on the steering wheel with both fists as he screamed at the radio. “While I don’t know what your destination is, mate,” Richards chuckled to himself, “I’m just glad I’ll not be there when you reach it.”

Before closing the door to the vacant cubbyhole that had been Bryan Morton’s office, Terri Campbell took one last look around. There was no trace left of the eager young man that she could see, just as there would be no memory of him once a new minister had been appointed and he got around to hiring a new director of communications. With a sigh, Terri closed the door and headed back to her office.

Her quest to extract vengeance on the minister for taking what he considered to be a principled stand against nepotism had not factored in the sort of collateral damage that transpired in the wake of the scandal she had set in motion when she had hired the anonymous Sealion. After years of government service, Terri Campbell should have known a self-assured young lad like Bryan would have jumped at the first opportunity that came his way to demonstrate to the minister he was a key part of the team by doing something like he did. “Oh well,” Terri muttered to herself as she entered the outer office leading to the minister’s and took a seat at her desk. “Maybe next time he’ll listen to his betters.”

“What’s that you’re going on about?” Telford asked as he was leaving the minister’s office with a crate in his hands.

After giving her head a shake, she looked over to where Telford was setting a box containing the last of the former minister’s personal items down.

“That’s the last of it. Finished with young Morton’s office already?” Telford asked.

Terri looked up at him through her lashes while sporting a sly little smile. “The wee lamb wasn’t here long enough to accumulate the odds and sods the likes of you and I surround ourselves with. I dread the day I’ll have to clean out your desk.”

“Never fear, dear girl.” Telford chuckled as he made his way over to the electric kettle Terri always kept warm and filled. He took to pouring himself a fresh cuppa. “I expect you and I will see many a sunset from the windows of our humble cells and a few more ministers passing through before that day comes.”

“I expect that’s what poor Bryan thought until the PM decided he had no wish to spend any political capital on our dear, late minister,” Terri ventured unrepentantly.

“The fool thought so too,” Telford replied distractedly as he flopped down in a seat across the room from Terri’s desk. “You would think a man who was supposed to be as switched on as the minister would have known that when it comes to a scandal like this, all the king’s horses and all the king’s men can never put poor Humpty back together again, no matter how hard they try.”

Putting her cup of tea to her lips, she used it to hide the grin that lit up her face. Perhaps the next minister would be astute enough to hire her son-in-law when she put forth his name to fill Morton’s post. And if not, well…

The Internet has become what radio was in the 1930s and TV was in the 1950s — a vast uncharted media resource that has yet to reach its full potential. Nowhere is this more evident than in politics, where tech-savvy twentysomethings are being courted — or, more correctly, bombarded—with information concerning elected officials, their policies, and their activities via 24-7 news feeds, blogs, social media, and targeted e-mails. Used correctly, this new medium can ensure a politician’s future. Abused or misused, it can end the career of an elected official faster than a New York minute.

Americans will, no doubt, realize this story is loosely based on the trials and tribulations of former congressman Anthony Weiner, a man who brought his political career to an inglorious end, first by shooting himself in the foot by posting sexually explicit material on the Internet and then all but blowing out his political brains while running for mayor of New York by doing so again. His actions stand as the epitome of a self-inflicted wound.

We deviated from the facts of his story by creating a situation in which a bogus account attributed to a politician, a very British one, was planted for the express purpose of doing damage to that politician’s career. In this case, it was an act of revenge. There is nothing, however, that is stopping a politician, his surrogates, or rabid — if misguided — supporters of his from using the Internet to wreak havoc on his political opponents. As former labor secretary Raymond J. Donovan stated so eloquently in 1987 after being acquitted of criminal charges the media had all but found him guilty of before he went to trial, “Where do I go to get my reputation back?” The answer today, in an unfiltered media saturated world, is nowhere. Damage to a public figure’s reputation, deserved or not, is all but impossible to erase.

HAROLD COYLE

The digital battlefield called the Internet changes fast, as was made abundantly clear when we crafted this story. At the beginning of the week, the criminal marketplace called Silk Road was fully functioning, but by the end, it had been taken down by the FBI and others with its alleged owner, Ross Ulbricht (Dread Pirate Roberts), under arrest. A few days later, a competing site, Black Market Reloaded, was also offline following a leak of source code. This victory proved short lived. At the time of writing, it has been relaunched.

The existence of such commercial sites on the dark Web, hidden deep within the encrypted world of the Tor network, shows just how out of balance the online war between law enforcement and criminal organizations has become. Many of these marketplaces operate with a slick efficiency that high street retailers would envy, offering escrow services, user reviews, and taking payment in virtually untraceable crypto currencies like bitcoin. The range of illegal goods and services offered is equally staggering, so it took no great leap of imagination to come up with the idea of “digital wetwork,” the assassination of an individual’s identity, reputation, or digital life for cash.

Deciding on the sort of individual who could offer such a service was also easy. There have been a vast number of very good books, articles, and research papers recently published about the people behind online crime and hacktivism. Such individuals with the requisite technical skills and lack of morals cannot be neatly pigeonholed. The same hacker may be a criminal freelancer, political hacktivist, and contractor for both organized crime groups and intelligence organizations, all in the same day. As a result, tracking and catching them across a global playing field becomes a gargantuan task. It’s a fascinating area that is only now being given the attention it deserves. For those who wish to know more, I would recommend Misha Glenny’s DarkMarket and Gabriella Coleman’s Coding Freedom as good places to start your own research.

The attacker’s technique to compromise the minister’s home laptop is something we in the security industry see all too frequently. A properly researched piece of bait containing a rather nasty digital hook is something even the most paranoid can fall for, and if one attempt fails, the attackers will keep on casting until they catch their target. This approach is often referred to as an APT, or advanced persistent threat, and whilst it started as a technique primarily used by foreign intelligence services, it has quickly become commonplace among organized criminals and others. Once attackers have a foothold on your machine, it generally doesn’t take long before your computer is completely under their control, or “rooted,” in hacker parlance. When they achieve that, anything you can do, they can do too, (and generally quite a few other things, as well).

It’s not all doom and gloom. Tommy’s advice in the story—“Patch regularly, get a decent antivirus package like Norton, don’t open unexpected docs or click on embedded links, and don’t use the same password for everything”—is pretty much it, although backing up your data to an external drive or a cloud service is also a good idea.

JENNIFER ELLIS

Richard Graham never looked forward to spending his evenings in a hospital, sitting about in a room that was as inviting as the waiting area of a train station, while trying to make small talk with a woman whose mind was long gone. As he battled his way home through the late-afternoon traffic, he thought about how, had he had any choice in the matter, a real choice, he would have stayed home with the children. Unfortunately, like so much in his life, he didn’t.

As he had for the past two weeks, as soon as they had finished their dinner, Richard Graham had driven his wife to pay a visit to her mother, a woman who had all but made the private Kirkland Hospital her second home. It wasn’t as if Graham was henpecked. Ellen, his wife, wasn’t the nagging sort. Her weapon of choice was silence, which at times could be just as annoying, not to mention unnerving. At least in a stand-up, no-holds-barred argument, Richard had a chance of figuring out what he’d done to piss her off.

Pausing outside the room where Ellen was entertaining her mother by telling her what the children were up to, how she had spent the day, and rendering her version of the latest family gossip that was going around, Graham took a moment to glance at his watch. Although he expected he wouldn’t be missed if he held back going in just a little longer, standing about in the corridor was even less inviting than sitting about listening to a fresh rendition of the same chatter he heard every evening. Besides, the nurse at the desk at the end of the corridor kept looking over at him, sporting what he took to be a questioning stare, one that was starting to make him nervous. Deciding there was no point in putting off making an appearance now that he’d finished checking his e-mails and delaying his return for as long as he dared, Graham drew himself up before manfully pushing open the door and entering his mother-in-law’s private room.

Looking over her shoulder when she heard the door open, Ellen Graham smiled. “Ah, there you are. I was beginning to wonder if I needed to dispatch a search party.”

“Um, sorry,” Richard muttered sheepishly as he glanced between his wife and his mother-in-law, both of whom were wearing smiles that were disturbingly similar. For a brief moment, he stood there, rooted to the spot as he found himself wondering if, over the course of time, the woman he had married would eventually look like the decrepit wretch in the bed, the one who had not only come to dominate their lives but was beginning to put an intolerable strain on his relationship with Ellen.

Coming to her feet, Ellen took up her purse from the nightstand next to her mother’s bed and made for the door. “I’ve so got to use the loo,” she muttered as she made her way past Graham. “Do be a dear and keep an eye on Mother.”

Before he could ask why Helen Walton, a woman who was hooked up to monitors and IV drips rendering her as helpless as a newborn, needed to be watched, his wife was gone, leaving him standing there like the hapless dupe he imagined he was quickly becoming.

From her bed, Helen looked over at Graham and gave him that smile, the one that was beginning to irk him. “How are the children?” she asked.

Though he had little doubt Ellen had already gone over every conceivable detail of what their children had done in the past twenty-four hours, Graham saw he had no choice but to tell the old woman again. With a sigh, he made his way over to the chair his wife had vacated, sat down, and pitched into his account with as much enthusiasm as he could, which, at the moment, wasn’t much.

Just as she was about to enter the clinic, Anna Morgan, the head night nurse, found she was forced to jump back, lest she be smacked in the face by the clinic’s door that a man had brusquely shoved open. He was followed by a woman who was snapping at his heels. Without missing a beat, the woman, whom Anna recognized as being the daughter of Helen Walton, took up a running argument the pair had obviously been engaged in before leaving the building. “She’s my mother, you self-centered bastard,” the woman barked without breaking stride. “Dear God, she’ll be gone soon enough.”

Having heard and seen it all before, Anna didn’t need to wait to hear how the man responded. Someone, she snickered as she stepped up to the door and entered the clinic, was going to be spending a cold, lonely night on the sofa.

After checking in with the head nurse currently on duty, Anna made straight for the pharmacist’s office. It was the first of the month, the day when all the passwords to the hospital’s computer systems were changed. She’d need to retrieve the unique password Christine Alsop had assigned her for the month, one that would allow her to access the spreadsheet where all the dosages for their patients’ medications and the schedule by which they needed to be administered were recorded.

Upon finding the door to Christine’s office unlocked, Anna shook her head and chuckled. In the morning, she’d have to remind the woman she needed to be more careful, lest the hospital administrator, a retired Royal Army Medical Corps officer, cited her for being lax with security again. Finding the lock to the lower left-hand desk drawer had been jimmied didn’t come as a surprise, either. Besides holding paper copies of all medications the current patients required, it was where Christine locked her purse away during the day when she was working in the clinic’s pharmacy. No doubt, Anna told herself, the woman had up and lost yet another key. Fortunately, the pharmacist, a woman who was otherwise a perfectly switched-on professional, would need to go to someone else to replace the lock.

After taking a seat in the pharmacist’s chair and pulling the drawer out, Anna leaned over as far as she could before reaching deep into the opening. Ever so carefully, she took to feeling about the rear of the drawer with her fingertips, wrapping them over the rear panel until they lit upon a Post-it note stuck to the back of it. Taking great care, Anna removed it, sat up, and read the password scribbled on it, pleased the pharmacist had taken her time to write it out, rather than using the illegible scrawl she so often used when jotting out prescriptions. When Anna was sure she had it memorized, she took her time replacing it and ensuring it had stuck before sliding the drawer back in place and heading out to relieve the evening nurse.

Hours later, the earsplitting squawk of a cardiac monitor shattered the early morning silence. As if jolted by an electric shock, Anna Morgan and the auxiliary nurse with her all but leaped out of their seats. The flashing of a light above the door and the rapid blinking of the computer screen told them the patient in room six, a fortyish gentleman of Arabic persuasion, was in cardiac arrest.

They didn’t waste any time wondering how an otherwise fit man who was recovering from surgery to piece together a compound fracture had managed to slip into cardiac arrest. That was not their concern; keeping him alive was.

Coming to their feet, the two nurses were about to take off at a run when two more monitor alarms began to sound. Realizing there was no way they could handle the unprecedented emergency they were faced with, Anna ordered the auxiliary to call for every able-bodied person on duty to report to their floor stat.

Anna didn’t waste any time trying to work out the whys or hows of the situation she had to deal with. Her entire being was focused on making the decisions many medical professionals have nightmares over but few ever have to face. What she did appreciate was that in the next few seconds, she would need to decide which patient she would go to first and who would have to wait. It was a decision she knew could very well turn out to be a death sentence to those Anna did not choose, but there it was. All she could do was what she was trained to do as best she could, as quickly as she could.

For Helen Walton, Anna Morgan’s best simply was not good enough.

As he rounded the bend of the jogging track, Andy Webb smiled to himself when he realized his timing, as it was more often than not, was pitch perfect. Slowing his pace the second he spotted the tall redhead with a lean runner’s physique, he did his best to pretend he wasn’t eyeing the woman as she went about finishing up her stretching. The redhead knew he was watching her. And he knew she knew. But it was a game both enjoyed as evidenced by the bright smile and wink she flashed him as she stood upright before turning and setting off at an leisurely pace, one she increased bit by bit as she settled into a well-measured stride.

Ever a sucker for a girl with red hair, Andy picked up his pace to match hers as he gamely followed the bobbing red ponytail, mesmerized by the way it fluttered gaily about in rhythm with the girl’s hips, arms, and legs. The idea of actually catching up with the woman and chatting her up had never entered his mind. To have done so would have spoiled the game for both of them. As they did each time they “happened” upon each other, the two runners simply settled into a comfortable pace, engaging in a harmless spot of fun, the kind most people would never understand and even fewer would be able to appreciate.

On this day, Andy’s pursuit of happiness was short lived, for a unique ringtone that was as annoying as it was unwelcome set his iPhone squawking. The idea of not answering, of ignoring the call from a man who had a maddening habit of ringing him up at the damnedest of times and continuing along the shaded jogging path in pursuit of a fluttering red ponytail was tempting, but it was one Andy was unable to give in to. Slowing his pace to a walk, he veered off the jogging track while smoothly pulling the mobile out of the little holster that was nestled in the small of his back. It was in the exact same spot where he had once hidden his Walther P5K when the people he was chasing were not quite as alluring as the redhead who was now moving farther and farther out of sight.

Mashing down on the Talk button, Andy brought the phone up to his ear. “This had better be good, mate. Otherwise, you’re in for it.”

“Interrupting something important?” Edward Telford asked, trying to make his question sound as innocent as he could but failing miserably.

“No, not really,” Andy replied, making no effort to check the disappointment he felt as he lost sight of his redhead.

“Well, if that’s the case, how about meeting me at the usual spot?” Telford shot back.

“I will, provided you pay for lunch.”

“Andy, dear boy, must I remind you I am a poor civil servant, a pathetic wage slave who labors away on what is for a prosperous entrepreneur like yourself little more than pocket change?”

“Save those crocodile tears for someone who gives a damn about your pitiful lot in life, Edward. Give me an hour.”

“An hour it is.”

With that, Telford rang off, leaving Andy standing off on the side of the jogging track looking off in the distance to where the redhead had disappeared. “Oh well,” he muttered to himself before turning away. “There’s always tomorrow.”

Despite his need to shower, change, and slog his way across London to the small pub just off of Whitehall, Andy was there at the appointed hour and well into his first pint by the time Edward Telford wandered in like he had all the time in the world. Looking up at the six-foot-four career civil servant, Andy grunted. “You do realize you’ve been on the clock for the past ten minutes.”

“Um, let’s see,” Telford mused as he averted his gaze upward while doing some math in his head. “Assuming you bother to work a full eight hours like normal human beings do, at eight hundred a day, that’s a hundred an hour, which means I owe you a tad over sixteen pounds fifty.”

Pulling back, Andy furrowed his brow. “You’re forgetting I’m not a desperate corporate flak who’s trying to make a quota you can bargain down with your slick talk and threats to go elsewhere. It’s eleven hundred a day and a favor, nonnegotiable.”

Staring across the small table, Telford sighed. “Has anyone ever told you you’re a cruel, heartless bastard?”

“Yeah, you,” Andy shot back. “Now, what’s so bloody important that compelled you to drag me all the way over here?”

“Are you familiar with the alleged mercy killings that took place over at Kirkland Hospital earlier this week?” Telford asked as he took the drink delivered to him without his needing to place an order.

“How can anyone who’s still drawing breath not know about the Home Counties’ very own Angel of Death,” Andy muttered in disgust. “You’d think there wasn’t anything else going on in the world besides that. What’s that got to do with you, and why have you called me away from something I was in the process of running to ground?”

Ignoring his friend’s comment, Telford proceeded to explain. “The chief administrator of the clinic is an old friend of mine, a retired RAMC officer I met in Ireland. You might know him — Kyle Lewis.”

“You forget, unlike you, I never had any need to bother with anyone associated with that lot. The whole bunch of them do nothing all day but hang out with sick people and look after eager young subalterns who haven’t got the sense to duck when they’re being shot at.”

“I’ll have you know I was ducking at the time.” Telford sniffed. “The bastard who shot me was behind me.”

“That’ll teach you to pay attention to what’s going on all about you.” Andy snickered.

“If you don’t mind, could we get back to the issue at hand? I’d rather like to keep the outrageous cost of your services down by avoiding any useless chatter or painful trips down memory lane.”

After sharing a chuckle with Andy, Telford continued. “As I was saying, Lewis is convinced the nurse the police are pinning the deaths on at his hospital is innocent. She claims she administered the prescribed dosages of medication called for by the schedule the pharmacist had left for her. Unfortunately, the toxicology reports for all the victims tell an entirely different story. None of the levels found in any of them even comes close to what the pharmacist had prescribed.”

“Well, that’s an easy one, Sherlock,” Andy replied dismissively. “I am assuming the clinic has a centralized computer system that records and tracks all the care each patient receives, including a schedule of medications.”

“Naturally,” Telford replied as he eased back and took a sip of his drink. “Unfortunately for Anna Morgan, the so-called Angel of Death, when the police checked the system’s audit logs, they found everything was spot on. The dosages of medications in the computer file matched those the pharmacist had prescribed.”

“Who checked out the system?” Andy asked.

Knowing his friend was going to ask this question, Telford reached into his pocket, pulled out his mobile, and scrolled down to the notes he’d made. “A detective sergeant by the name of Marbury, Hannah Marbury of the Yard’s computer crimes unit.”

Upon hearing this, Andy grunted before taking a sip of his pint as he mulled something over in his head. “She’s good. I imagine if there was something to be found in the system, she would have found it.”

“Lewis thinks otherwise,” Telford countered. “He believes his nurse’s story. That’s why he asked me if I knew someone who could take a look at the system and see if the police somehow missed something.”

Without any need to give the matter a whit of thought, Andy nodded. “I have just the person who can find any glitches in a system like that, provided there is one.”

“Please tell me it’s not that odious little dwarf of yours,” Telford moaned as he set his drink down. “Lewis runs a respectable hospital that caters to an extremely exclusive clientele, who right now he’s fighting very hard to keep.”

“Not to worry, mate,” Andy replied with a cheeky grin. “Karen Spencer is as respectable and discreet as can be. She’s what the Americans call a military brat. Her father is a retired U.S. Air Force colonel who works for Symantec. She used to, as well, until I poached her from them.”

Satisfied, after placing their order with a waiter without bothering to consult a menu both knew by heart, Telford gave Andy all the details he would need to get started.

Pleased to find no one in the Calico Row office she shared with Andy Webb and Tommy Tyler, Karen Spencer decided this was as good a time as any to do something she’d been itching to do for days. Snatching up the trash bin next to her desk, she carefully sneaked across the floor toward Tommy’s desk even though she was alone. Once there, she began to clear away the trash and clutter her coworker merrily accumulated all about his workstation and on the floor around it.

Doing so was no easy task, for not all the crumpled pieces of paper were rubbish. Some were notes Tommy wrote to himself in an indecipherable code and handwriting only he understood. Then there were the unidentifiable sticky bits that caused Spencer, whom Andy and Tommy called Spence, to wrinkle her nose in disgust as she was picking them up with the very tips of her fingers. How anyone could stand being surrounded by such a mess, let alone do anything productive in its midst, was beyond her. The only thing she was thankful for was her boss, a man who reminded her in so many ways of her father and who was like her when it came to neatness and organization.

She wasn’t quite finished when a voice from across the room startled her. “You know, Tommy is going to be royally pissed when he’s seen what you’ve been up to.”

Jumping even as she was spinning about to face Andy, who was standing in the open doorway, Spence scrambled to hide the nearly full rubbish bin behind her back. “I wasn’t doing anything,” she stammered in a high-pitched voice that betrayed both surprise and guilt.

Andy said nothing. He had no need to. His half smile and the look he gave the youngest member of Century Consulting was enough. It reminded Spence of the look her father gave her whenever he caught her in the midst of violating any of the rules he imposed upon her in a well-meaning but often stifling effort to raise her without the benefit of a mother or anything resembling a stable home life as they wandered the globe from one posting to the next.

Determined to finish what she’d started, consequences be damned, Spence went back to carefully picking through the clutter Tommy Tyler nested in, clearing away as much as she could as quickly as she could, for he would not be nearly as forgiving as Andy had been if he found her disturbing the unique, if somewhat hideous, ecosystem he found comforting.

For his part, Andy made no effort to stop the fastidious young woman wearing a frumpy gray Keep Calm and Carry On T-shirt from finishing her self-appointed task. Besides appreciating the fact it saved him from having to badger Tommy into doing it himself, Andy enjoyed watching the sparks fly whenever his two employees, who were rapidly becoming more family than subordinates, went at it like a pair of Kilkenny cats. Though he never dwelled on it, he appreciated they were the closest thing to children he would ever have, so he enjoyed their antics as a father would whenever the opportunity to do so came his way.

Only when she was finished clearing away as much as she dared and while she was washing her hands at the small sink set in a counter where they kept their tea, biscuits, and such did Andy inform her he had a new mission for her.

“I’m not quite finished translating that programmer’s guide from geek-speak to English yet,” she replied as she gave her hands a quick shake over the sink before toweling them off.

“That can wait. Besides, this shouldn’t take all that long,” Andy added as he watched Spence saunter back over to her desk and flop down into her chair with an ungainliness he found to be lamentable when he saw it in a young woman who had as much going for her as Spence did.

Setting that sad thought aside, Andy went on to the matter at hand. “The chief administrator of Kirkland Hospital has asked if we would do a top-to-bottom security inspection of his facility’s IT system. You’re to pay particular attention to those workstations and devices that are used to manage medications.”

“Anything in particular I’m looking for?” Spence asked innocently.

Holding her in a steady gaze for a moment, Andy found himself wondering if she was being serious or simply winding him up. Only an appreciation that Karen Spencer was not in the habit of joking when discussing a case kept him from responding with a flippant comment. “Kyle Lewis, the chief administrator, believes the woman the media has taken to calling the Angel of Death is innocent.”

“Innocent of what?”

This time, Andy simply couldn’t help himself. “Seriously, Spence, don’t you pay the least bit of attention to the news?”

“No. Should I?”

Rather than waste his time responding to her reply, Andy simply filled her in on all the background information he felt she would need, including the names of the members of Metropolitan Police’s Computer Crimes unit who’d conducted the initial investigation. “I don’t expect they missed anything, but one can never be sure,” he concluded. “When dealing with such things—”

“I know, I know,” Spence muttered before Andy was able to finish reciting one of the innumerable bits of wisdom he routinely peppered her with. “Two sets of eyes are better than one.” At least he’s using English today, she told herself as she set about gathering up what she’d need to take with her, and not Latin as he so often tends to when offering up what he considers sage advice.

Spence did not head over to the hospital straight off. Instead, after giving Detective Sergeant Marbury a quick call, she made her way to the New Scotland Yard building where the Met’s Police Central eCrime Unit, or PCeU, was based.

“I gather you’ve been brought in to conduct a security review of their system,” Hannah Marbury said as she nodded to Spence and handed her a mug of what the Metropolitan Police liked to pretend was tea. “My boss was not in the least bit pleased to be leaned on by the Home Office, but I guess with all those well-heeled foreign patients at Kirkland, it should have come as no surprise.”

She paused and smiled at the young woman she had first met at a British Computer Society meeting on “The Forensic Challenges of Steganography,” where the two of them had been the only ones still awake by the end of the presentation. They had struck up a companionable relationship right off, for Spence reminded Hannah of herself when she was just starting out as a young constable, and Spence saw in Hannah the sort of self-assured and successful professional woman she would love to be.

“Just as well I didn’t tell him you and I knew each other,” Hannah added. She took another sip of her tea and grimaced. “God, this is awful. How do you fancy a nice cuppa ’round the corner?”

“As I’m on expenses, that sounds good to me.” Spence grinned at the thought of Andy having to sign off her claim for a full afternoon tea at the very posh St. Ermin’s Hotel as the two women dumped their mugs and grabbed their bags.

An hour later, over a very elegant china cup of Earl Grey and an equally indulgent chocolate éclair, Marbury finally opened up about what she’d done to find out if there was any truth in the story the night nurse persisted in clinging to despite the evidence.

“She claims she followed the prescribed dosages to the letter,” Hannah explained before taking another bite while trying to keep the cream oozing out of the éclair from dropping down her blouse. “But I went through the audit logs on the SharePoint server — where the master drugs files are held — with a fine-tooth comb,” she continued after taking a moment to savor her sinfully rich pastry. “The master file matched the paper records to a tee. Neither had shown any indication of being altered. The only access made that night to the SharePoint server was from the iPads the medical staff use whilst on duty. The link between it and the system’s mainframe is an encrypted Wi-Fi connection. In order to access the system, the staff have to use two-factor authentication. Then, just to put the cherry on the cake, the whole system is air gapped from the Internet whilst every workstation tablet and laptop all have their USB ports and DVD drives disabled. The whole system and their procedures are pretty damned impressive.”

“So you think she did it?” Spence posed the question even as she herself was beginning to think Nurse Morgan’s alibi was looking decidedly shaky.

DS Marbury sighed. “To be honest, I don’t see any other explanation, and God knows I looked. She’d just come off sick leave for stress. She was breaking up with her boyfriend, and the audit logs showed no changes. It doesn’t take the brains of an archbishop to figure out with all that going on in her life her mind was elsewhere.” DS Marbury sighed again as she recalled all the times when her attention had been diverted by personal problems when she should have been focused on what she was doing. Then, with a shake of her head, she set those thoughts aside before helping herself to another éclair.

Later that afternoon, having learned all she could from Hannah Marbury and with a good idea of what she would be dealing with, Spence finally made her way to the hospital. While she was waiting at the receptionist’s desk for the hospital’s IT specialist to come out and meet her, Spence took a quick look about. Behind the receptionist was a big multifunction printer and a half dozen or so desks with workstations squeezed into an open-plan office space where the hospital’s admin staff worked. Entry into this area was achieved by passing through a secured door with a keypad lock just to the left of the receptionist’s desk.

“There’s no need to waste your time with the computers on the receptionist’s desk or in the admin area,” Marbury had advised Spence. “They’re on an entirely separate virtual local area network. The system used to manage each patient’s medical records, including current meds and prescribed dosages, is completely locked down and also secured in a locked and alarmed server room. The servers are virtualized on clustered blades with daily, weekly, and monthly backups before being transferred onto encrypted tapes for offsite storage. User access to the system is only via thin clients or iPads, so there’s no way to introduce malware, whilst the admins run a three-month patch cycle, but only after running all changes through their test rig.

“As you’ll find, the workstations, as well as the tablets the nurses use, are secured in areas that can be accessed only if you have the code for the electronic lock, which is changed weekly. The tablets themselves are stored in a locked high-security safe that serves as their charging station while all the workstations can only be accessed with the CAC unique to it.”

Though she couldn’t imagine Andy would send her off on a snipe hunt, based on what Marbury had told her, Spence could not discount the possibility her efforts would be a monumental waste of time. Still, she reminded herself as she looked about, she had her marching orders. Besides, even Hannah Marbury confessed in a high-profile case like this one it was best if a second pair of eyes went over what she’d done. “I may be good, but I’m not perfect,” Hannah had confessed as they were finishing their tea. “Not yet, anyway,” she added with a wink and a grin.

Spence was still going over the way in which Marbury had described her approach to the problem and what she would do differently when Liam Stapleton, the hospital’s full-time IT specialist, appeared and introduced himself. “I am at your disposal, Ms. Spencer,” Stapleton informed her with a casualness that struck her as being out of place given the reason she was there. “But before you get started, Mr. Lewis would like to speak to you, if that’s all right with you.”

Never having had the opportunity to handle a case on her own from start to finish, Spence was a little nervous at the prospect of conducting the initial interview with a client. Wishing to make a good impression, as she and Stapleton were waiting outside Kyle Lewis’s office, Spence took a moment to glance at her reflection in the glass of a photo that hung on the wall over the multifunction printer she’d spotted while she’d been waiting. She was in the process of tucking her long hair behind her ear when a very enraged Richard Graham came storming out of the office. He all but pushed Spence out of his way as he barged through the door, stopping only to snarl back through the open doorway into the room he had just left without ever once turning to Spence and apologizing.

“You’ll be hearing from my solicitor, Mr. Lewis!” Graham snapped.

Equally thrown off his game by Graham’s behavior, Stapleton wasted no time in hustling Spence into Lewis’s office once Graham was gone. The only thing that was merciful about the stilted exchange of greetings and introductions that followed was it was brief, leaving Spence free to get on with doing what she did best: delving into the inner workings of a computer network.

For the next two days, with Stapleton hovering nervously over her shoulder, Spence waded through reams of policy and design documents, piles of risk and asset registers. This was followed by a review of patch states and change logs, vulnerability scans, and a check of the entire system using aggressive malware detection utilities. Apart from some minor recommendations she shared with Stapleton, when she was finished, Spence had come up with precisely nothing.

More disappointed than frustrated, when she had done all she could think of, Spence slumped down in the seat of the train carriage on the way back to the office, going over in her head everything she had done just to be sure that when she reported the results of her efforts she could do so with a clear conscience. Only the antics of a businessman who was busily tapping out an e-mail on his iPad and a scruffy youth who was equally busily hammering away at his laptop distracted her. Had the boy not kept glancing over at the businessman out of the corner of his eye every now and then before carefully readjusting what appeared to be a tube of Pringles crisps, Spence never would have suspected a thing. As it was, as the train began to pull into her station, she slowly made her way down the carriage past the young man and stole a glimpse at his laptop screen. Yep, she concluded. She was right; he was running a wireless packet sniffer. Satisfied, she continued on until she was alongside the businessman who was still engrossed in his e-mail.

“You’re being hacked,” she muttered softly after tapping his shoe with the toe of her sneaker.

Startled, the businessman looked up at her.

“The boy with the red backpack and laptop halfway down the carriage is monitoring your e-mail,” she said.

Whether the businessman believed her and stopped typing didn’t matter to her. As she had at the hospital, she’d done her best, which was all she could do.

“I’m sorry, Andy; it really looks as if she did it,” Spence lamented. She’d been dreading this moment all afternoon. It didn’t help that Tommy, who was hunched over his desk in the corner as he disassembled yet another perfectly innocent Android device, was doing a piss-poor job of pretending he wasn’t listening in. “Between what Hannah Marbury found and my review of the system’s security, I can’t see any other explanation.”

“You’re absolutely sure?” Andy asked, equally dreading the thought of reporting their results to Kyle Lewis. Notwithstanding a pathological hatred of failing, good customers were hard to come by, and a long-term contract with a private hospital would have been very welcome indeed in the current financial environment. Andy toyed with his pen for a few long moments, putting Spence in mind of her old school principal deciding whether or not her latest escapade required a call to her father. “Tommy? Have you got any ideas?”

Tommy continued to prod at the innards of the hapless device before him even as he spoke. “If Spence said she went through the software and documentation with a microscope, then she did. In theory, it’s locked down tighter than a gnat’s arse.” When he finally did look up, he grinned. “Trouble is, like you, I don’t put much stock in theory. As good as Tinker Bell is, she hasn’t been out in the real world long enough to be as paranoid, twisted, and devious as old buggers like you and me.”

Pausing, Tommy shot a quick glance over at Spence to see how she was reacting to his comments, particularly his use of a nickname he knew she despised. Only when he was sure she wasn’t about to bound up over her desk, rush across the room, and wring his neck did he look back at Andy. “I was thinking it might not be a bad idea if me and her take another look see, provided of course you think it’s worth the effort, boss.”

As much as he hated to undercut Spence, Andy knew Tommy had a point. As a young officer straight out of the commissioning course at Sandhurst, he’d found himself having to swallow his pride more than once when one of his NCOs came up behind him and whispered in his ear that he’d missed something that was obvious to anyone who’d been in the army more than a day.

Spence sat slumped over with her forearms resting on her desk while glaring at the monitor. She wanted to keep Andy and Tommy from seeing the scowl on her face as she tried to decide whether to be annoyed or relieved that Andy had sent them back to Kirkland for a second look. It bothered her that despite all she’d done since she’d joined the firm, he still did not have enough confidence in her work. Yet as bad as that was, the idea he would have Tommy, a misogynist SOB if ever there was one, look over what she had done just to be sure she’d not screwed up made things even worse.

She’d done everything at the hospital right. She had no doubt about that. If there had been a glitch in the system or an external hack, she would have found it. She’d told the hospital administrator as much. And yet, despite the care with which she had laid out her findings before him, he still persisted in believing the nurse’s story. About the only bright spot she could come up with was that Tommy would confirm her findings. Maybe then Andy would set aside the doubts about her competence he obviously harbored and have more faith in her in the future.

Lost in thought, Spence was startled when Tommy called out to her from his desk.

“Oye! Tinker Bell, stop daydreaming.”

Sitting upright, Spence gave her head a quick shake before looking over at Tommy. “Uh?”

When he saw the blank expression on her face, he grinned. “I said, get your kit together, girl.”

Wincing when she realized her response hadn’t been the cleverest of replies, she gave her head another quick shake as if to clear away the mental cobwebs. “Why bother now?” she muttered dismissively. “All the IT staff have probably gone for the day.”

Tommy’s grin broadened. “Good. That means we don’t have to put up with a bunch of nosy parkers asking all sorts of stupid questions or getting in our way.” With that, he grabbed a ratty day sack containing his laptop and tools and started for the door, not bothering to look back as he did so to see if she was following. It was only then that Spence realized what he had called her.

“Tinker Bell!” she muttered under her breath as she snatched her laptop carrier that also served as her handbag and headed off after Tommy, who was already out the door. “I’ll strangle that little runt if he calls me that one more time. I swear I will.”

Behind her, Andy kept his face hidden behind his monitor, desperately trying to suppress a broad grin even after Spence slammed the door behind her.

“The problem nowadays is people forget about people,” Tommy opined as he swung his battered old Range Rover into the early evening London traffic with an absolute disregard for anyone else on the road. “They get too focused on their own little piece of the problem, whether it be hardware, software, or procedures. They tend to ignore the fact that there is no such thing as a foolproof security system or protocol since fools are so bloody ingenious.”

Clasping her laptop’s carrier against her chest in an effort to give her hands something to do lest she reach over and throttle Tommy as he tried to wax philosophical, Spence listened in silence as he droned on.

“I’ve found more often than not some lazy bugger who couldn’t be bothered doing what he’s supposed to do always finds a way for getting ’round it,” he continued, even as he was cutting off a chauffeur-driven Mercedes while chopping across two lanes to get onto Vauxhall Bridge, blithely ignoring the horns of at least two outraged drivers whilst Spence reached stealthily for the door handle.

“I’m sure you did a thorough job. Andy’s not the type who’d hire an idiot. But what’s on the system or in the manual ain’t always what’s happening in the real world. For example, did you check the mouse mats?”

It took all her strength to set aside the outrage she felt over Tommy’s last comment in order to respond civilly. “Why should I have checked the mouse mats?” she replied through clenched teeth. “They’ve nothing to do with the system.”

“Oh yes they have, dear girl.” Tommy snickered. “Bet you a fiver that within five minutes of getting there, I will have a log-on and password to the secure system.”

Thoroughly peeved, all Spence could do was gape at his arrogance while ignoring as best she could the way Tommy was throwing his Range Rover around like he was still in a tank. “How?”

“Post-its and mouse mats, girl. The two of ’em are the most dangerous threat to security since the French declared the Ardennes impassable to tanks.” Tommy paused as he took a moment to chuckle to himself at his own joke before turning his attention back to the serious business of scaring the living daylights out of any driver foolish enough to come within fifty yards of him as he pressed on with all the careless recklessness of a hussar charging a battery of Russian guns.

By the time they arrived at the hospital, Spence’s ire had been replaced by an acute feeling of queasiness brought on by Tommy’s driving. Fumbling her way out of the car, all she could do was stand there in the car park, collecting her wits while sucking in deep breaths of the cool night air.

Coming around from his side of vehicle, Tommy didn’t pause as he made for the hospital’s main entrance. “What are you doing standing there like a bleedin’ gork? We ain’t got all night to dillydally about. Now let the dog see the rabbit!”

With a sigh, Spence drew in a deep breath as she stepped off, leading the way to reception. There she pulled out her temporary contractor’s pass and showed it to the young woman at the desk. “We’re doing a follow-up to my earlier work for Mr. Lewis. I brought someone from our specialist team to assist,” she explained while nodding in Tommy’s direction as he prowled around the waiting area. Grudgingly, the receptionist allowed them in.

They’d not gone but a few steps when Tommy dug his elbow into Spence’s ribs.

“See the door?” he muttered while canting his head toward the security door leading to the admin area.

“The security door?”

“Not very secure now, is it?”

Having been caught up in her own thoughts and busy with the receptionist, Spence hadn’t noticed there was a mop and bucket wedging the door open. The sight of it caused her heart to sink as she realized Tommy had proved his point.

Suddenly feeling very uncertain of herself, Spence followed Tommy into the back office where he nodded amiably to a startled cleaner before he took to poking around the desks. “Ha! Bloody told you so,” he exclaimed a few moments later as he waved a mouse mat under her nose. That’s five quid you owe me.”

Spence’s eyes widened in shock at the sight of a Post-it note stuck to the bottom of the mouse pad. She was still trying to come to terms with how anyone could commit such a flagrant breach of the hospital’s security procedures even as Tommy plopped the mouse pad back where he’d found it — minus the Post-it note, which he’d stuck in his pocket — and moved on, poking around behind the various monitors and under the keyboards. After he’d finished his search of the desks, finding another Post-it note in the process, he turned his attention to the big printer at which Spence had stood before on the first day she’d come here. Pulling out a Maglite torch from his pocket, he twisted it on as he pressed himself against the wall the printer was set against in order to look behind it. Within moments, the grin was wiped from his face.

“Oh shit!”

Spence slowly eased up behind him. “What is it?”

Tommy didn’t answer her at first, concentrating instead on moving the printer out a smidge before bending over to take a closer look behind it.

“Tommy, what did you find?”

He still didn’t answer, at least, not her question. Instead, he straightened up and turned toward her wearing an expression that told her the fun and games were at an end. “Call DS Marbury now!”

Even as she was pulling out her phone, Spence eased around to where she could peer over Tommy’s shoulder in an effort to find out what had caught his attention. In the tight beam of the torch he still held focused on the rear of the printer, she could make out a small white stub sticking out of a USB port on the back of the printer. “Is that what I think it is?”

“Yep,” Tommy muttered glumly even as he came to appreciate his task had taken a deadly turn. “It’s a GSM dongle, sure enough, a big fat back door that’s left the whole system swinging wide open in the wind. With that little sucker plugged in, anyone with its phone number can hack the printer. From there it’s a hop, skip, and a cat-five cable to the servers, which is how I expect the bastards managed to hack their way into the medical files. So if you don’t mind, be a good girl and give Marbury a call. Tell her she needs to get her skinny little bum back down here, PDQ.”

The next morning, after making an entrance that would have startled a corpse while sporting a cat-who-got-the-cream grin, Tommy sagged when he saw Spence wasn’t at her desk. “Where’s Tinker Bell?”

Looking up from the report concerning the Kirkland Hospital incident that Karen Spencer must have dropped on his desk after he’d left, Andy frowned. “You know she doesn’t like it when you call her that.”

Tommy’s grin took on new life as he gave Andy a quick wink. “I know.”

Realizing he was hell bent on gloating over the way he had cracked the case, Andy eased back in his seat and watched Tommy as he made his way to a desk that was once more cluttered with a fresh layer of crumpled paper, sticky notes, sweet wrappers, and bits and pieces of computer hardware not even Andy was able to recognize. “I’d wish you would go easy on her,” Andy stated flatly. “She’s new to this twisted little world of cybersecurity that you and I have been dealing with for better than a decade. Given time, I expect she’ll not only be able to keep up with us, she’ll be able to run rings around us.”

Unlike Karen Spencer and — to a degree — Andy, who’d earned his master’s degree in cybersecurity compliments of the Army Reserves, Tommy was a graduate of the school of hard knocks. He’d learned his trade the same way he’d earned his stripes when serving in the Queen’s Dragoon Guards. Like everything else in his life that mattered to him, he’d done it the hard way. That, in his opinion, was the only way someone learned what was important when dealing with the majority of hackers, people who’d never read a book on cybersecurity in their lives. So he was far less willing to cut a novice like Karen Spencer any slack. Naturally, he didn’t tell Andy this. He had no need to since Andy already knew how Tommy felt, which was why he was issuing what, for Andy, was a gentle warning.

Deciding it would not do to start the day off on the wrong foot with the boss, Tommy nodded. “Okay, boss, you got it. Not a word about how I pulled Tinker Bell’s tiny toes out of the fire.”

Rolling his eyes, Andy gave his head a quick shake before going back to Spence’s report. He was more than pleased she’d made it clear that had it not been for Tommy’s suggestion to go back to the hospital and his discovery of the GSM dongle, the poor night nurse would have been rotting in jail. While Tommy would always be Tommy, Andy concluded, at least Karen Spencer was a team player who understood the need to work together, even if doing so required biting one’s tongue from time to time.

It was almost a year later when DS Marbury invited Spence to join her in court. Remembering when her first collar was sent down, she knew the younger woman would want to be there the day Richard Graham’s sentence was pronounced. From the back of the crowded courtroom, the two women watched as a somber-faced judge sentenced Graham to life for a crime the judge declared in sonorous terms was “so callous and so unthinkable that all right-minded people shudder. Your lack of remorse, your persistent denials, and an ardent refusal to identify you coconspirators leave me no option but to sentence you to the maximum penalty permitted by law.”

Leaning closer to Spence, Marbury whispered in her ear, “I expect like you, the most frustrating part of my job is I’m seldom able to be here when a little git like Graham is sent down. So whenever I have the opportunity, I damn well make the time to watch when a case like this is wrapped up.”

Spence sighed. “I appreciate you asking me along. I’ve never been involved in anything like this, let alone seeing the face behind the crimes. I expect seeing this can be so… so…”

Only when Marbury realized the young woman next to her was unable to find the right words, words that would not come across as unseemly or inappropriate to describe her feelings, did she finish Spence’s thought. “So glorious?”

Grinning, Spence peeked over at the detective sergeant out of the corner of her eye. “I was actually thinking sad, given what Graham did, but glorious works just as well.”

The two of them were on their way back to New Scotland Yard when Spence glanced at Hannah Marbury, who immediately understood what was behind her young friend’s mischievous little grin. “Tea again?” she asked as she began to grin, as well.

“I don’t see why not. I think we’ve earned it,” Spence replied airily. “Besides, we got a long-term contract with Kirkland last month. I don’t see how Andy could possibly object.”

“I don’t suppose that contract covers the cost of my dry-cleaning bill,” Marbury ventured. “You wouldn’t believe the grief I got the last time you and I had tea when I returned to the office with chocolate smeared on my blouse. To hear my inspector, you’d have thought I’d been nice to a politician.”

“There’s an easy work-around that’ll keep that from happening again,” Spence ventured. When she saw she’d suckered Hannah in, she tilted her head to one side and smiled. “Leave the éclairs alone this time!”

“You cheeky moo!”

They were still chuckling when the tea service arrived, and Hannah took it upon herself to serve them both. “I should be the one buying you tea,” she muttered somewhat shamefacedly. “I don’t know how we missed that dongle.”

“You and me both. I can’t tell you how annoying it is to have Tommy rub my nose in it every time Andy isn’t around. It’s seriously starting to piss me off.”

“You’ve got to give the devil his due. He did find it.”

“I know.” Spence sighed as she took her cup from Hannah. “Still, it irks me no end having to be grateful to an odious, knuckle-dragging Neanderthal like him. That’s the absolute cherry on the cake.”

“Sounds just like my first governor when I’d made detective constable. He was a bitter little jock with no time for women in the service, let alone as a DC.” Hannah paused in recollection for a moment. “I do have to admit, as much as I hate to, that by the time he was invalided out two years later, I’d learned a hell of a lot from that miserable bastard.”

Spence perked up. “How did he get injured?”

“Cirrhosis of the liver, dear. He really was an old-fashioned copper.”

While Spence and DS Marbury were still very carefully negotiating their way through a cream tea, Ellen Graham finally arrived home, for once blissfully deserted by waiting hacks and photographers. After putting the kettle on, she dug out a couple of chocolate digestives, drew the curtains, fixed herself a cuppa, and settled down on the sofa. Only then did she allow a smile to finally touch her lips.

Having played a role that swung from dutiful wife throughout her husband’s trial to an enraged daughter who’d lost the beloved terminally ill mother she’d spent months tending, Ellen Graham was in desperate need of a holiday.

The past few months and her need to keep her wits about her during the twin ordeals of a trial and a funeral had not been easy, she concluded as she pulled an old, battered laptop out from its hidden recess under the sofa, the same laptop she’d used to search for and hire someone to hack into the system at Kirkland Hospital. The hacker had helped her bring to an end both her mother’s suffering and the alarming drain those hospital stays had been putting on the inheritance to which Ellen felt she was entitled. As to setting up a scheme that would allow her to dispose of an annoying husband without the need to endure a messy and contentious divorce, well, that had been a chore she’d managed to take care of all on her own. The idea of using an old GSM dongle Richard had left carelessly lying about, a device she’d taken great care to ensure had his fingerprints on instead of running the risk of purchasing one on her own, had been an absolute stroke of genius.

Having accomplished all she’d set out to do and paid off a man who had helped her solve two insufferable problems in a single stroke, the time had come to book that well-earned holiday she had so been looking forward to. The Greek islands would be nice, she thought to herself as a little smile lit up her face.

This was an easy one. Like so many other aspects of life in the twenty-first century, computers have become an integral part of the medical systems in developed nations. My own medical records, which includes the medications I take and their prescribed dosages, are part of the Veterans Administration database. This allows anyone with access to that database to pull them up, review them, and — if I’m being treated at any one of the 153 VA hospitals, 773 outpatient centers, or 260 vet centers across the United States — refer to them. It is a useful tool, a tool that can be abused for any number of reasons.

During an interview with Dick Cheney on CBS’s 60 Minutes in October 2013, the former vice president candidly admitted one of his greatest fears was that assassins would remotely access the electronic device used to compensate for irregular heart rhythms and assassinate him by altering them. While we did not use this technique to do in dear old Granny, the method of attack we did settle on is just as viable if the hospital and the caregivers responsible for treating patients leave themselves open to manipulation or attack.

As systems become more complex with an ever-increasing number of people having access to a growing number of wired-in electronic devices, the vulnerability of either part of the system or the system as a whole increases. In 2011, there were 5,724 registered hospitals and 4,973 community hospitals in the United States. The next time you visit a hospital, either to visit someone or out of necessity, take a moment to look around and count the number of computers and electronic tablets that are being used by the staff, both medical and administrative. Then, if you have overly active and slightly twisted minds like ours, think of the many ways they can be accessed, manipulated, and altered. Scary, isn’t it?

HAROLD COYLE

We started with the idea that a Sherlock Holmes — type “locked room” mystery could equally apply to a computer system, and the fictional system for Kirkland Hospital could quite easily have been accredited to an international security standard like ISO 27001:2013.

First of all, it’s air gapped — that is, there is absolutely no connection between the hospital’s medical systems and the Internet. The key services are all run on multiple, separate virtual servers, and everything is backed up daily whilst the key systems are all clustered to ensure that even if a server does go down, a replacement kicks in immediately. Patching and upgrades to the operational systems takes place regularly every three months following exhaustive testing in a test environment. All user workstations are locked down so that no one can plug in a USB device, and there are no CD/DVD drives, except under the control of IT. The medical staff all use hospital-provided iPads that connect to a strongly encrypted wireless network. The wireless network itself is kept at deliberately low power so that it can’t be accessed from outside the hospital buildings, let alone the private grounds. Finally, the SharePoint server, containing the file with all the prescriptions, has full audit logging enabled so that any changes to either the server or any of the files on it are captured in a separate secure log within a separate server. On the night in question, there were no unusual entries in the audit log.

So how did our hacker break in and commit murder? As described, the initial attack vector was through one of the hospital’s multifunction printers. Once Ellen Graham had plugged the GSM dongle into the USB port, she let our digital assassin know it was in place. From there, the digital assassin dialed in and compromised the printer (because its firmware hadn’t been upgraded like the rest of the hospital’s IT) and was able to use the wired local area network to find and compromise the main Active Directory (AD) server (because of the three-month delay in the patch cycle). The AD server is pretty much the heart of the network; once you’ve rooted that, you’ve got everything. He then set up a new virtual server (easy enough), recovered the most recent backup of the SharePoint server, and installed it under the name TEST whilst, of course, deliberately messing up all the dosages. Finally, he temporarily swapped the address of the real SharePoint server with the doctored TEST server on the AD server, and Bob’s your uncle. When Anna the nurse logged on, it was recorded on the AD server, which then directed her to the newly renamed TEST server. The wrong dosages were given, and nothing appeared out of place on the real SharePoint Server’s logs.

Thankfully, in real life, nurses and doctors are trained to check and double-check dosages by hand and confirm each other’s work.

Finally, a quick note about the techniques Tommy used when he got to the hospital. Everything he saw I too have seen for real during security audits on equally secure systems. If a human being invents a secure process, it’s as sure as day follows night that someone else will find a way to avoid it and will then tell all his or her friends and colleagues.

And yes, I really hate Post-it notes!

JENNIFER ELLIS

Like a medieval king perched high above a castle’s keep, Angelo Rossi kept a close eye on all that occurred within the garage of the Manhattan-based livery service. From his glass-enclosed booth set on a raised platform, he liked to think he saw everything, from who came in and out of the shop area or hung out on the street when the bay doors were open to who was slacking off. At the moment, he was watching Joseph Torres, the company’s chief mechanic, chatting with a man Rossi didn’t recognize. After tossing his cigarette out into the street, Torres shook hands with the stranger before making his way back into the shop.

Having learned the hard way it was best to trust his gut instincts when they told him something was going down, especially when a person with Torres’s record was involved, Rossi opened the sliding-glass divider and called him over.

Torres knew right off what the little prick wanted. With that in mind, he slipped both hands into the pockets of his coveralls. “Wha’d I do now?” he asked as he approached the booth.

“Who was that?” Rossi asked gruffly.

“A friend of a friend. Why?”

“Don’t give me that shit,” Rossi muttered dismissively.

Taking care to leave the small electronic device wrapped in a wedge of crisp, new one hundred — dollar bills behind, Torres pulled his hands out of his pockets and threw them up in the air. “Hey, how many times do I have to tell you I’m off the junk? You wanna give me another piss test, be my guest. But you’ll be wasting my time and yours, not to mention keeping me from checking out Mr. Caprio’s Lincoln.”

When the dispatcher didn’t give in right off, Torres shrugged. “Fine. But when Mr. Caprio comes down here to find out why that thumping he complained about last time isn’t fixed, you’re gonna be the one doin’ all the explaining, not me.”

Doing his best to keep from showing any sign that he was concerned over having to do so, Rossi continued to glare at him. Torres, who wasn’t about to let the little shit stare him down, returned the shop foreman’s unflinching glare, all but daring him to call him a liar. In the end, it was Rossi who gave in first, not because he was convinced Torres was telling him the truth about being clean. Rather, the idea of sending a car to pick up Daniel Caprio and his wife that wasn’t in tip-top shape was as near a fireable offense as he wanted to go. So he sucked in a deep breath before telling Torres he’d better be damned sure whatever was wrong with the Lincoln Town Car was fixed, or it would be his ass in the sling.

Torres waited until he was well out of earshot before muttering, “Asshole,” under his breath. He waited even longer before pulling the small device out of his pocket and inspecting it. He’d been paid to install it in the Town Car reserved for Daniel Caprio that night. He’d been told it was nothing more than a tracking device by the man he pegged to be a Jamaican. Never having seen anything like it before, he looked for some kind of manufacturing markings or ID. When he found none, he concluded either the people who were interested in keeping track of the notorious lawyer’s whereabouts tonight didn’t want the device tracked back to them or, more likely, the manufacturer had no wish to be named as a coconspirator in a case involving illegal snooping. Not that it mattered to the mechanic. He’d been paid well to do a ten-minute job that, if done right, could be the beginning of a new and profitable business relationship with the well-spoken Jamaican.

Rossi was about to climb down from his perch and head over to where Torres was working on Caprio’s car to ask him why he was under the hood and not checking out the vehicle’s suspension when the dispatcher entered the booth through a door leading to the company’s front office whilst holding a phone to his ear. Clamping a hand over the handset’s microphone, the dispatcher informed Rossi that Daniel Caprio was on the line. “He says he’s decided to have dinner out before going to the theater and wants his car to pick him up early.”

“How early?” Rossi asked.

“He says he’s got reservations at a place in the Village in half an hour.”

Rossi rolled his eyes. “You better tell him he ain’t gonna make it.”

The dispatcher held the phone out to Rossi, taking care to keep his hand over the microphone. “Here, you tell him.”

Knowing better than turning down a request from a man like Daniel Caprio, Rossi took a quick glance out onto the garage floor over to where Torres was still tinkering with the car the lawyer usually used. Upon seeing the mechanic wasn’t finished with it, Rossi drew in a deep breath. “Fine,” he growled as he turned his attention back to the dispatcher. “Just tell Mr. Caprio it’s not going to be his usual car.”

Relieved he wouldn’t be incurring the wrath of a man who was widely known to be the legal mouthpiece for some of New York City’s most notorious figures, the dispatcher brought the phone up to his ear and informed the lawyer a car was on the way even as Rossi was calling out to a driver who had been scheduled to pick up some Brit media big shot later in the evening that he’d be driving Daniel Caprio instead.

Spotting the bodyguard left to keep an eye on both the car and its driver made it easy for the Belizean Creole to keep them from noticing him as he casually walked by the Lincoln Town Car parked outside the theater. After allowing his eyes to linger on the vehicle’s license plates as long as he dared without stopping, the man headed back up the way he had come, where he climbed into the front seat of a yellow cab parked on the opposite side of the street.

“You sure it’s the right one?” the cabbie asked as the Creole took up the remote control unit from the middle of the front seat and set it on his lap.

“I assure you, it is the right car,” he muttered with an accent most New Yorkers would have mistaken as being Jamaican. This included the cabbie, a native of the city who knew its ins and outs as well as how to make a quick buck on the side.

“Did you test that thing to make sure it’s working?” the cabbie asked.

“It works,” the Creole snapped, annoyed by the cabbie’s incessant need to talk when there was no need to. “You’ve no need to worry about what I do. Just keep as close as you can to the car I pointed out to you when we go.”

Though he was still unconvinced the stranger he’d been saddled with for this job knew what he was doing, the cabbie decided it would be best if he kept his peace. If anyone was going to screw up, it wasn’t going to be him. After dodging New York traffic for eight years without a serious mishap or official complaint, he was one of the most reliable people various cartels like Los Zetas had in the city. Of course, most of the time, all he did was pick up packages at local airports or serve as a guide and driver for various contractors sent north to handle a job, much like the man next to him. His current assignment, that of participating in a carjacking without actually being in the stolen vehicle, was something entirely new. Whether he would have taken the job was a question he probably would have asked himself had he known what the Creole actually intended to do. He didn’t, of course. Like most of the people he dealt with, they told him only what he needed to know, and he kept from asking them anything other than when, where, and how much.

A tapping on the passenger window of the cab startled both men, who had been focused on watching the crowd as it emerged from the theater. Snapping his head about, the Creole saw a fussily dressed middle-aged man bending over, staring at him through the partially open window.

“Excuse me, but are you available?” the gringo asked.

“No,” the Creole snapped.

“If you’re not available, why is your light on?” the would-be passenger asked brusquely even as his eyes were darting about, first toward the cabbie’s face and then to the remote control the Creole was holding on his lap.

“We are not free,” the Creole growled. “Piss off.”

Offended, the man on the street pulled back. He was about to tell the little Jamaican off when the cabbie called out to the Creole. “Is that him?”

Having been distracted by the would-be fare, the Creole didn’t get a good look at the passenger of the Lincoln Town Car before the man was in it and the driver was sliding in behind the wheel. “Go! Go!” was all that the Creole managed to spit out by way of response.

Flummoxed and more than a little annoyed, the man on the street watched as the cab pulled away from the curb and took off, but not before he managed to take the cab’s medallion number. “No one tells me to piss off and gets away with it,” the man muttered to himself as he watched the taxi disappear around the corner behind a black Town Car.

Annoyed by the untimely interruption and determined not to let anything else keep him from carrying out his orders, the Creole abandoned his plan to wait until the Town Car had reached the intersection of Broadway and Forty-Seventh Street before taking over control of it. If truth be known, he wasn’t at all sure the mechanic at the garage he had paid to install the device was reliable. So instead of being patient, as soon as the Town Car’s driver turned onto Broadway and started to head south, the Creole switched on the remote control and took control of the Town Car.

For the first few blocks, the results of his efforts to create panic and chaos did little more than draw attention to the Lincoln Town Car as it bounced off of other cars to its left and right or rammed the rear bumper of the car in front of it. Only when it crossed Forty-Seventh Street and the Creole was able to drive the Town Car up onto the pedestrian area was he able to accelerate it to a speed that turned the car into a guided weapon, sending those late-night revelers who were able to keep their wits about them scattering for safety behind concrete planters and anti-vehicular pillars. Those who couldn’t, people who froze in place when they saw the black Town Car barreling down on them, became what many of the survivors thought were the latest victims of a terrorist attack.

The dispassionate call over the police cruiser’s radio belied the urgency of the unfolding drama on Broadway. Mary Silva, an eight-year NYPD veteran and driver that night, didn’t bother to wait for Patrick Long, her partner, to tell her to step on it. While he was responding to the radio call, she hit the lights, gunned the engine, and pulled out into traffic. Both officers ignored the honking horns and threats hurled at them by other drivers they were forcing aside as they did their best to reach the intersection of Forty-Second Street and Broadway ahead of the runaway Lincoln Town Car.

Doing so was no easy feat. Silva paid no heed to the bumps and sound of metal scraping against metal as she sideswiped several cars that couldn’t or wouldn’t make enough room for her to pass them. Any concern she had about the hell their sergeant would raise for the collateral damage they were causing was strictly secondary to their desperate need to block the intersection before the rampaging Town Car reached it.

As it turned out, their timing could not have been better — or worse, depending on where you were at the moment they rolled out onto Broadway. Silva had no sooner entered the intersection after swerving around a city bus than a set of high beams drew her attention away from what was ahead and to her left, just in time to catch a fleeting glimpse of the Lincoln Town Car before it ploughed into her side of the cruiser.

The force of the impact drove the cruiser sideways several feet and staved Silva’s door in, causing her to yelp. Long, after being rattled around like a cat in a tumbling barrel, recovered just in time to see the Town Car back away. But instead of going around the crippled cruiser, the driver of the Town Car gunned the engine and rammed them again.

Realizing he had no choice, not if he wanted to save his partner, Long threw open his door and bailed out, unsnapping the strap of his holster as he did so. By the time the Town Car had backed up yet again but before its driver had a chance to make another attack, Long leaned across the hood of the cruiser and took as good an aim on the driver as the situation and his adrenaline-charged state allowed him.

Whether his was the first shot that caused what followed or those of two officers who had been on foot patrol and had also responded was unimportant. What was important was the way the three patrolmen blazed away, emptying the magazines of their pistols as quickly as their fingers could work the triggers.

The devastation left in the wake of the Town Car followed by a volley of gunfire thoroughly rattled the cabbie. Without waiting for a word from the man next to him, who was doing all he could to stare straight ahead past the traffic piling up before them, the cabbie threw his cab in reverse. This did little more than plough into the front end of the cab behind them. In panic, after glancing about, the cabbie threw his door open and fled on foot, leaving the Creole little choice but to do likewise. He at least had enough sense to take the control unit with him, holding it close against his side as he lost himself in the crowd of screaming city dwellers and out-of-town visitors as they fled a scene of bloody carnage and confusion. It wasn’t until he was several blocks away that the Creole dropped the controller into a trash bin on a side street before making his way down into the subway, where he had no difficulty blending in with the crowds on the platform.

The temptation to ignore the chirping of his mobile phone was almost too much to resist. But, like the early morning call to the colors, Andy Webb found it wasn’t in him to do so. Muttering a few well-chosen expletives to himself, he turned off the shower, pulled the curtain aside, and reached out for his mobile.

Naturally, the bloody thing slipped through his wet fingers and bounced off the tile floor, causing Andy to wince as he listened to it clatter about before adding a few more oaths to those he’d already uttered. After picking the mobile up and checking to ensure it was still working, he hit Redial and then held the phone to his ear whilst stumbling about the cold bathroom floor, groping for a towel.

“Ah, good. I’m glad I caught you,” Edward Telford boomed in a tone of voice that was far too cheerful for Andy, given his current mood.

“I hope to hell for your sake this is important,” Andy growled as he began dabbing himself one-handed with the towel.

“How would you fancy a trip to America?”

“That depends,” Andy shot back.

“Depends on what?”

“Where it is you’re wanting me to go.”

“New York City,” Telford declared cheerily.

In a foul mood already, Andy found himself incapable of holding back. “How would you like a sharp stick in the eye?”

“Oh, it’s not all that bad, is it?”

“When was the last time you were there, Ed?”

“It’s been a while. Why?”

“Because it seems you’ve forgotten what it’s like to be conveyed through the canyons of the Big Apple while traveling in the backseat of a New York cab.”

“Funny you should mention that,” Telford countered as he did his best to ignore his friend’s churlish attitude and moved on to the purpose of the phone call. “Meet me in an hour.”

“The usual place?” Andy asked as he continued to struggle to towel himself off with one hand and hold the mobile to his ear with the other without slipping on the tile floor.

“No, not today. Meet me near the East Surrey Division’s monument.”

Though this odd choice of linkup point piqued his curiosity, Andy wasn’t about to play a thousand questions with his friend, not while he was standing there, stark naked and dripping wet. “Yeah, an hour. Now piss off.”

“And a happy good day to you too,” Telford responded, pleased that he had for once been able to rattle the notoriously unflappable Andy Webb.

Andy was more than a little perplexed as to why his friend had asked him to meet in Battersea Park instead of some more civilized venue as he made his way to the monument dedicated to the men of the Twenty-Fourth East Surrey Division who had died in a war so very different from the one he fought each and every day. Curiosity about his friend’s unusual request was replaced by amusement the second he spotted the former Guards officer turned very proper civil servant. A man who spared no expense when it came to cultivating an air of sophistication was feeding pigeons, a creature he was known to detest. Even more amusing was how Telford was attired. His efforts to blend in by wearing wraparound sunglasses, a gray hoodie, and an Arsenal baseball cap were, to Andy, almost comical. Deciding he needed a little payback for the way Telford had upended his morning routine, Andy slowed his pace and changed direction quickly. Then, taking his time, Andy slipped up behind him in the same manner he’d relied on in Belfast before announcing his presence.

“I must say, football mufti does not become you, not in the least. Forgot to pick up your laundry again?”

Though he tried to keep his friend from seeing he’d been surprised, Telford couldn’t help but flinch. Coming around to face Andy, he tossed the last of the bird feed out in a wide, sweeping arc as he did so, crumpling the empty bag in his hand as he subconsciously drew himself up before his friend as he often did when trying to use his height to impress the person he was speaking to. “I’ve got a favor to ask you,” Telford informed Andy as he took to slowly walking alongside his friend. “This one is strictly on the QT.”

“All right, mate, you’ve got my attention,” Andy replied as he eased over to Telford’s left. Subconsciously, he fell in step with Telford as if on parade, even as he was unconsciously scanning the area to see if anyone was paying any attention to the two of them; something in Telford’s voice caused old habits to kick in.

“I’ve had a number of members of the cabinet, including the PM — as well as quite a few members of Parliament — approach me one at a time asking if I could discreetly look into the death of Randolph Mullins,” Telford muttered as the two men sauntered along the park path side by side.

“I thought that was all wrapped up and done with. Shot with his homicidal driver by New York’s finest in what the American tabloids call suicide by cop.”

“So did I,” Telford responds grimly. “I was tempted to fob the matter off as nothing more than political paranoia. But I changed my mind after I went to see the people who usually deal with such things at the Foreign Office and asked to speak to whoever it was they had looking into the matter. To say I ran into a stone wall every time I brought the matter up is a monumental understatement.”

“Maybe they’re happy with what the American authorities are telling them — that it was a terribly unfortunate incident and they wish to close the book on the matter as quickly as possible. After being pilloried by the tabloids and conspiracy crackpots for years in the wake of Lady Diana’s death, I don’t blame them for wanting solid, irrefutable evidence that HMG is innocent of any wrongdoing, that the whole incident is what the Americans say it is — an unfortunate incident involving one sadly disturbed psychopath.”

On being reminded of the aftermath of the Princess of Wales’s death, Telford visibly winced. He had just reached the dizzy heights of the senior civil service when that had occurred, plunging him headfirst into a political shit storm of epic proportions. “That’s what they, meaning our people and the Yanks, want everyone to think,” he replied warily once he’d managed to stuff his memories of those awful days back into the corner of his mind where he hid his personal feelings and concerns. “The truth is, behind the smiley face they’ve slapped on the incident before filing it away under ‘nothing to see here, move along,’ there seems to be more than a few people wringing their hands even as they’re glancing over their shoulders to make sure there actually is nothing creeping up on them that’s going to bite them in the arse.”

As Andy well knew, Edward Telford had sources burrowed within all the agencies, ministries, government offices, and corporations he dealt with, people he relied on to provide him with a peek behind the curtains from time to time to see what was really going on. “I’m all ears,” Andy replied dryly as the two men slowly sauntered through the park, each giving every passerby a quick, surreptitious once-over.

“I’m told by people who know about such things that, a while back, the U.S. Department of Defense experimented with using the built-in computer system of a car to remotely gain full control of it.”

“That’s no great state secret,” Andy scoffed as he used the toe of his shoe to gently boot aside a scrap of paper someone had tossed onto the path.

“That may be, but the fact that such a system may have been used to kill Mullins would be.”

Doing his best to keep from reacting to this tidbit, Andy dropped his nonchalant, ho-hum demeanor as he took to peppering his friend with a barrage of questions. “You sound as if there is no doubt in the minds of those who would be privy to the case. Did they find the car’s ECU tampered with?”

“It’s what?”

Reminding himself that he needed to explain anything even remotely technical to Telford using the simplest words possible, Andy took to describing how a sophisticated telemetric device could be used to override any security measures the vehicle’s manufacturer had built in to prevent someone from controlling certain mechanical and electronic components of a car remotely. “Once a black box is properly wired into the targeted vehicle’s computer bus line, all a person needs is a transmitter set to the same frequency as the receiver, and you have yourself a full-scale radio-controlled car.”

“That’s just what the powers that be might be suspecting — or, more correctly, fearing, which is probably why I’ve been asked to have someone like you look into this discreetly,” Telford replied glumly, almost to himself, before going on to explain his comment. “Despite the profuse apologies from both the mayor of New York and the American Secretary of State, there are quite a few people who are a part of HMG, or closely associated with it, who either believe there’s more to this story or wish to do everything within their power to make sure there isn’t.”

Although he suspected he already knew the reason for such skepticism, particularly given Mullins’s reputation as a man with a file on everyone, Andy felt compelled to pose the next logical question. “If that’s so, why all the tiptoeing about?” he asked candidly while glancing over at Telford out of the corner of his eye to gauge his friend’s reaction. “You’d think everyone would be eager to find out who did it.”

“If the case involved anyone else, that would be true.” Telford sighed as he averted his gaze. “Unfortunately, Mullins — a man who clawed his way to the top of the news business the old-fashioned way — knows, or I should say knew, where all the political bodies are buried here and more than a few in the States. While I don’t think anyone is sorry to see the wretched hack go, there are quite a few people who are very concerned over what his family or his solicitors may find when they start going through the private files he was rumored to have kept on both his friends and enemies.”

Knowing that in cases like this there was no such thing as a dumb question, Andy asked the obvious. “Why me? Wouldn’t it be better if a computer hack like Ian McDonnell over in Legoland or DS Marbury looked into this?”

Whether it was a subconscious response to Andy’s question on his part or not, Telford took a quick glance about the park before answering. “The people who asked me to look into this aren’t quite sure who can be trusted. Until we know for sure there’s a ‘there’ there, they want to keep this on the low down. Besides, if I’m not mistaken, you have a friend in New York who is uniquely qualified to help you in this case,” Telford added as something of a knowing smile tugged at the corners of his lips.

Seeing no point in asking who the mysterious they were that Telford was referring to — or how he knew about Susan G. — Andy moved on to the next order of business. “So what’s the mission? Pursuit of the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, or do you expect me to ferret out any hint of impropriety that can be linked to HMG and bury it?”

“I’m not sure.”

“You’re not sure? When will you be?”

“I won’t know until you tell me if there is something HMG needs to concern itself with,” Telford replied after giving the matter some thought.

“You do appreciate this isn’t Belfast,” Andy muttered, making no effort to stifle the irritation he felt over the manner with which his friend was playing upon his dedication to queen and country to back him into a corner. “If I’m hearing what you’re saying right, there’s not going to be an all-powerful brigadier watching my back, ready to come galloping in to pluck me out of the muck if I step on some very sensitive toes.”

After drawing in a deep breath, Telford took to looking about at everything around him save Andy as he slowly let it out. “I know,” was all he said by way of response.

Realizing he wasn’t going to get a straight answer, Andy shrugged. “When do you need an answer?”

“Two days ago.”

Unable to help himself, Andy rolled his eyes. His friend’s response was as predictable as it was vintage Edward Telford, one Andy suspected he used to motivate otherwise slovenly government bureaucrats who had the unfortunate need to answer to him.

Having gotten as much from Telford as he suspected he was going to in regard to the forlorn hope he had been volunteered for, Andy moved on to more practical matters, the kind he, as a businessman, needed answers to. “Who’s picking up the tab?”

“A retainer that should be more than enough to cover your travel expenses, billeting, and subsistence, as well as an advance you’ll probably need to pay your American associate will be wired into your account by the end of the day,” Telford informed him in an offhanded manner without letting on where the funds were coming from. “The balance of what’s owed you will follow when the job’s done.”

Again, seeing there was no point in pressing him for a straight, no-bullshit answer, Andy moved on. “Since you’re so hell bent on keeping this sub rosa, when and where do we meet again?”

“At the game on Saturday next, if that’s possible.”

“I don’t have tickets for it. It’s sold out, remember?”

Telford stopped and waited for Andy to do likewise before stepping in front of him. “There’s one for you in the newspaper,” he informed his friend as he handed over the paper he’d had tucked up under his arm.

Unable to help himself, Andy chuckled. Like so many other veterans he knew from his time in Belfast, Telford never missed a chance to play secret agent man. “I hope the seats are better than last time,” he informed the Guards officer turned government flunky.

“You get what I can afford. After all, I’m just a humble servant of HMG.”

“Yeah, right,” Andy sneered as Telford turned and walked away.

Only after Telford was gone did Andy find himself wondering if one of the people who had been on the shit list Randolph Mullins was rumored to have kept was Telford himself. Not that it made any difference, Andy told himself as he turned away and headed off in the opposite direction.

From the doorway of the Calico Row office belonging to Century Consulting, Andy took a moment to look about. “Where’s Spence?”

Without bothering to look up from his monitor, Tommy grunted, “I sent her to fetch tea, biscuits, and milk.”

“You sent her?” Andy asked incredulously as he made his way to his desk.

Tommy grinned. “In a roundabout way, I did.”

Unable to help himself, Andy chuckled, for he knew Tommy’s ways. Rather than coming out and telling Karen Spencer they needed to restock various items they were out of, whether it be office supplies or tea, he’d make a great show of noisily poking around the office searching for things he knew they were out of until Spence, unable to concentrate on her work with him noisily thrashing about, asked him what he was looking for. After informing her, she’d save her work, get up, and go over to the cabinet where the item Tommy was looking for was kept. If they really were out of something, she would inventory their supplies and draw up a list of items they were out of or low on before heading out the door to the local corner shop.

Chuckling to himself, Andy took a seat at his desk. “You know, one day that girl is going to catch on to that little charade of yours and tell you to stuff it.”

Tommy was unfazed by Andy’s warning. “I daresay if she hasn’t figured it out by now, she never will.”

After enjoying a chuckle over this, Tommy turned his attention back to what he’d been working on while Andy took a few minutes to poke around the Internet, pulling up whatever he could find concerning the death of the media mogul. Now that he knew there just might be more to the story, he took care to see if there was anything hidden in the published stories he could follow up on. When he found none, he next turned his attention to handwriting a letter to a former NYPD detective named O’Conner he’d worked with before when he’d been tasked to track down a notorious Russian computer expert living in New York who had had links to the IRA.

After finishing the letter, Andy eased back in his seat, wondering how she would react to his letter. It wasn’t the nature of the request he was making to Susan Giovanna O’Conner, whom everyone called Susan G., that worried Andy. Like him, she was a consummate, tenacious, take-no-prisoners professional. What concerned him was whether the two of them would be able to work together as effectively as they had in the past, even providing she was willing to. She’d changed since he’d last seen her. She might not be keen on renewing their relationship, even if it was a purely professional one, just as the last case they’d worked on together had started out, for he imagined it might be just as awkward for her as it would be for him.

Setting that thought aside, Andy lurched forward and read the letter to her he’d drafted. Satisfied with it, he turned his attention to addressing an overseas express envelope. If there was, as Telford had put it, a “there” there, the last thing Andy wished to do was to send anything regarding the case bouncing about the globe via the Internet, ricocheting off one server to the next where anyone tapped into the Web who was interested in any traffic regarding Mullins’s death could pluck it out of the ether and find out what he was up to.

Finished with addressing the envelope, Andy glanced over to Tommy, who was hunched over his keyboard in a pose that always put him in mind of a tech-savvy version of Quasimodo. “Whatever it is you’re working on, finish up as best you can by noon. Then go home, pack your kit, find your passport, put your household on lockdown, and be ready to pull pitch either tomorrow or oh-dark-thirty the day after.”

Ever eager to go off on one of Andy’s adventures, provided it didn’t involve tromping up and down Hadrian’s Wall or meandering about some other tumbled-down edifice left behind by the Romans whilst listening to a drier-than-dirt description of how the damn thing was built, Tommy asked what he needed to pack. “What’s it going to be? Brown stuff, green stuff, or gray stuff?”

“Gray,” Andy replied, using Tommy’s terminology for clothing appropriate for an urban environment. “Definitely gray. About a week’s worth.”

“We taking Tinker Bell with us?” Tommy asked cautiously.

Andy had considered doing so, but only briefly. If it did turn out Mullins’s death was the result of carjacking by remote control, the method used would involve hardware, which was Tommy’s field of expertise. Spence was the software wiz of the team, well-schooled in the dark art of navigating her way through vast oceans of code. As true as that was, the real reason he’d dismissed the idea of including her on this foray was personal. Andy wished to spare himself the necessity of taking on the role of mother to a pair of bickering siblings. While Tommy Tyler and Karen Spencer were consummate professionals whose technical expertise was second to none, the two were like vinegar and oil — palatable in small doses but difficult to mix. This had proven to be especially true in the wake of the Kirkland Hospital case. As much as he liked Tommy’s brash, no-nonsense demeanor and his ability to get right to the heart of a problem, the man had the unfortunate habit of going from tolerably annoying to downright aggravating when gloating over his latest triumph. “No, not this time.”

“Aw, too bad,” Tommy muttered while flashing Andy a Cheshire cat grin before turning his attention back to what he’d been working on, leaving Andy free to reread the letter he’d written. As he was doing so, he thought about adding a personal note at the bottom before slipping it in the express mail envelope. No, he finally concluded. This is going to be awkward enough without making a comment that might not be appreciated or might be taken the wrong way, he thought to himself as his mind once more turned to Susan G.

The idea Susan Giovanna O’Conner wouldn’t be there to greet them never entered Andy’s mind. The way she had gone about catching his attention as he and Tommy emerged from customs didn’t surprise him, either. It was more than her five-foot-nine height, further enhanced by the two-inch heels of her stylish black boots that caught Andy’s eye straight off. Not even her coppery red hair was the main draw. Rather, it was the sign she was holding that caught his attention.

Standing front and center in a cluster of limousine drivers, she held a sign up as if she were just another chauffeur waiting for a client. But rather than a last name scrawled on a plain white sheet of paper, the background of hers was a Union Jack upon which was written in an ornate script:

That, along with the lopsided smile she flashed him when their eyes met, were more than enough to tell him she’d not lost the quirky sense of humor that had made working with her years ago more interesting than it should have been.

With an affected nonchalance, Andy made his way up to her, dragging his sole piece of luggage behind him. He stopped when he was still a respectable and safe arm’s distance away. After making something of a show of inspecting her from head to toe, he grinned. “I must say, you certainly have changed.”

Unable to help herself, even as she was lowering the sign, Susan averted her gaze. After an awkward moment of silence, she peeked back up into Andy’s eyes through her lashes. “And you haven’t, not one bit.”

It was now Andy’s turn to go all shy as he stuffed his free hand in a pocket of his trousers and shrugged, wondering if the coloring of his cheeks was betraying a most unwanted response he was unable to tamp down.

Tommy, who’d been standing off to one side, couldn’t help but grin as he watched this scene play out. For once, he kept his tongue in check, resisting the urge to say something that would spoil what he believed was an emotional reunion between two former lovers. That he was about as wide of the mark as he could be was something neither Andy nor Susan did anything to make clear by the way they conducted themselves. Instead, the tall, well-proportioned redhead cleared her throat.

“If you’re finished here, my car is outside double-parked in a no-parking zone. I thought I’d drop you two off at your hotel and give you a chance to freshen up and sort yourselves out before we pitched into this mysterious quest of yours.”

Realizing it just might be best if he did take a bit of time to collect his wits and figure out how he was going to go about dealing with Susan G. now that he had had an opportunity to see just how different she was from what he had expected, Andy nodded. “Yeah, right. Good idea.”

Having managed to pry precious little out of Andy at the hotel after Susan dropped them off, Tommy wasted little time pumping the tall redhead for information as she was driving them to the NYPD impound lot. “Andy never did say how you two met,” Tommy blurted from the backseat of Susan’s car as she bobbed and weaved through early afternoon traffic with a reckless abandon that put the taxi drivers to shame.

“I think it would be best if Andy told the story,” she replied just before cutting off a city bus that was pulling away from the curb. “You were, after all, the one who came to me back then,” she added as she glanced over at Andy, sporting a devilish grin that told him her wording was meant to be suggestive.

At the moment, Andy wasn’t up to playing along with Susan’s wicked little game as he wondered if it would be best if he closed his eyes and used what precious little time he had left to watch his life flash before his eyes or keep them open to bear witness to the calamity he expected was but a hair’s breadth away. “Are you trying to reenact Mullins’s death, or is this the way you drive all the time?”

“What’s wrong with my driving?” Susan asked innocently as she gave the wheel of her car a quick jerk to the left to avoid rear-ending a cab that had stopped in the middle of the lane she was in to pick up a fare.

“You either have a charmed life or you’re crazier than you were when I last saw you,” Andy intoned as he watched Susan zip past a cyclist who flashed them a one-finger salute.

“And when was that?” Tommy asked in a feigned offhanded manner as he once more tried to find out what had gone on between her and Andy.

“You’re rather persistent,” Susan chirped brightly. “Just like your boss is.”

“Aye, he can be as tenacious as a terrier when he wants to be. But I guess you already know that.”

“A terrier?” Susan quipped as she glanced over at Andy out of the corner of her eye. “I always thought of him as something of a Labrador — you know, the cute, cuddly kind.”

Not at all pleased with how this exchange was playing out, Andy glanced over his shoulder, shooting Tommy a look that warned him the fun and games were over, that the time had come to cease and desist, or else.

Taking heed, Tommy acknowledged the wave off with a broad, toothy grin. He expected there’d be ample opportunity later to find out more about the woman Andy was doing his damnedest to keep from looking at, he told himself, as he eased back in his seat and settled into enjoying the wild ride she was treating them to.

At the impound lot where the NYPD stored abandoned and illegally parked vehicles, the trio was met by a man Susan identified using only his first name before introducing both Andy and Tommy in a similar fashion. “Kevin and I were partners,” she informed them.

Andy didn’t let on that he remembered Detective Kevin O’Banyon as the two men shook hands. They’d met only in passing in 1988 when he’d been working with Susan. No doubt she was doing all she could to keep anyone from knowing more about the others than was absolutely necessary — just in case someone got wise to the unauthorized visit O’Banyon had arranged for the two men who Susan had told him were friends of hers from the UK. Likewise, he didn’t bother asking her if Andy was still working for the same people he had been when he’d been sent in to the States to track down a Russian with ties to the IRA, as well as a number of other nefarious groups.

After being admitted to the yard with nothing more than an exchange of nods with the officer on duty at the gate, O’Banyon led them to where the wreckage of the Lincoln Town Car Mullins had died in now sat. As they were doing so, Susan used the opportunity to engage O’Banyon in some idle chitchat of a personal nature. “What’s Kevin Junior up to these days?” Susan asked.

O’Banyon grunted. “Don’t ask. I’ve not heard from the boy in weeks. I’d like to think he’s too busy studying.”

When she responded with a snicker followed by a glib remark that caused O’Banyon to guffaw, Andy, who was walking a few paces behind, couldn’t help but be struck by the way the two carried on as if nothing had changed. It had, of course. Even from behind, a single glance of Susan’s figure and the way she carried herself told himself it most definitely had.

“Here we are,” O’Banyon declared as he stopped before the black, bullet-riddled Lincoln Town Car with a crumpled front end. “If the people from the Technical Assistance Response Unit found anything when they went over it, it didn’t make it into this,” he added as he looked side to side before reaching inside his jacket and pulling a thick envelope out of an inner pocket.

Neither Andy nor Susan had any need to ask O’Banyon what was in the envelope.

“I imagine I owe you big-time for this,” Susan stated as she quickly took it and slipped it into her oversized purse.

“Oh, you bet,” O’Banyon replied with a grin. “You can start by coming by on Sunday for dinner and talking some sense into Fran.”

“Okay, what did you do to piss her off now?” Susan asked glibly.

“Me? Nothing. It’s Kevin Junior who’s in the doghouse. She wants me to drive up to that overpriced college Junior talked me into sending him to and making sure he’s still alive.”

“And what do you expect me to do?” she asked as she maneuvered herself so that O’Banyon had to turn his back on the Town Car to talk to her.

“Fran will listen to you. She doesn’t believe me when I tell her boys tend to fall off the face of the earth when given their first taste of freedom.”

“And what makes you think she’ll believe me?”

“Besides knowing what it’s like, she trusts you.”

As amusing as it was to listen in on this lively exchange, Andy’s attention was distracted by Tommy, who had eased away from the others. While Susan distracted O’Banyon, Tommy took to rooting about under the bonnet of the wreck like a ferret burrowing a nest for itself. Only when he backed off, turned toward Andy — who was doing his best to keep from watching him — and gave him a quick nod while slipping something into his pocket did Andy interrupt Susan. He reminded her the last time he and Tommy had eaten was on the plane.

When she looked over O’Banyon’s shoulder and saw Tommy stepping away from the car, she knew he’d found whatever it was he had been looking for. Turning her attention to Andy, she chuckled. “You’re worse than he is,” she mused as she cocked her head toward O’Banyon. “There are only two things he’s ever interested in.”

“Dare I ask what they are?” Andy asked.

“One’s his stomach,” she replied as she pivoted about on her heels and began to head back to the yard’s gate. “I expect you can work out what the other thing is on you own.”

As he and O’Banyon watched her walk away, Andy grinned. “She really hasn’t changed, has she?”

Knowing exactly what the Englishman was saying, O’Banyon nodded. “No, she hasn’t. If anything, she’s become more of a pain in the ass.”

“I heard that,” Susan called out without bothering to look back over her shoulder at Andy and O’Banyon or slow her pace.

From where he was listening in on this exchange, Tommy watched as the two men broke out in laughter before following Susan, wondering if there was some kind of inside joke he wasn’t privy to. Deciding it might be worth his while to look into the tall ginger’s past to see if he could sort out just what was so special about her, he gave the black box he’d found connected to the Town Car’s computer bus line a pat as if to ensure himself it was there before stepping off and following the others.

After buying lunch for O’Banyon as a way of repaying him for the favor he’d rendered them and bidding him a quick farewell, Andy asked Susan if there was someplace Tommy could examine the black box he’d found while they went over the report O’Banyon had slipped to them.

“My office, of course. I’d be rather shocked if Jenny Garver, my assistant and in-house computer whiz, didn’t have everything Short Round over there might need.”

“I heard that,” Tommy muttered as he came up to Susan’s left.

Looking down at the man beside her who barely stood higher than her shoulders, Susan flashed him a devilish grin and winked. “I know.”

Realizing it was game on, Tommy returned her steady, unflinching stare. “You never did tell me how you two met.”

Once more, Susan winked. “I know.” With that, she turned to Andy, who was on her right. “Come on, cowboy. I expect you’re on the clock.” With that, she stepped off and headed out the door of the midtown restaurant.

“She’s something else, isn’t she?” Tommy proclaimed as he watched her from behind.

“That she is,” Andy muttered more to himself than in response to Tommy. “That she is.”

At five foot four, Jenny Garver was as close a match in height to Tommy as could humanly be. That’s where the physical resemblance ended. While Tommy looked like someone had attached a pair of stubby legs, two short arms, and a round head with chubby cheeks onto a beer barrel, the lean girl from Oklahoma with raven-black hair, big brown eyes, and a western drawl that flowed out of her mouth as smoothly as the Red River was the very definition of petite. But it was the way they went about dissecting and analyzing the black box Tommy had found that left Andy realizing they were two peas in a pod.

“Where did you find her?” Andy asked Susan as he watched from across the room as Tommy and Jenny went about their work like a pair of kids who’d stumbled upon a shiny stone.

“She was my driver in Iraq,” Susan replied quietly as she watched the girl, who had become as precious to her as her own daughter, examine the black box.

“Really? I didn’t know you made that one. Were you, ah…”

Looking away from Jenny and over to him, Susan gave Andy one of her signature “get real” looks. “This isn’t the UK, old boy.”

“Whatever happened to once a marine, always a marine?”

Susan’s face clouded as anger over the American military policy concerning someone like her welled up. “Despite what some people think, I’m still a marine.”

“If you say so.”

“Semper fi. Now, come on, cowboy,” she muttered in an effort to change the subject as quickly as possible even as she was making her way into her office. “Let’s go see what the copy of the official report Kevin slipped us has to say about the demise of your man.”

“He’s not my man,” Andy replied as he followed Susan and took a seat across from her at a small conference table she had there.

“He’s a Brit, isn’t he?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, in my book, that makes him your man.”

Andy bit back a sigh. “If you say so.”

In addition to a copy of the police report concerning the investigation into Mullins’s death, Susan had found a second, seemingly unrelated one in the overstuffed envelope O’Banyon had given her. The first one was by far the longest and most detailed. It was the other one, however, that caught their attention and on which Andy focused since the Mullins report was pretty much in line with what the mayor’s office and the FBI had made public.

Despite being a sparse one-pager, there were several tantalizing little tidbits in the second report that piqued his attention. It concerned a taxi that had been abandoned on Broadway on the same night Mullins had died. That, in and of itself, was of little importance since a fair number of drivers had bailed out of their vehicles and fled as soon as the police had opened fire on the Town Car farther down on Broadway. What did make the report relevant were three facts, none of which it seemed anyone had bothered to link, let alone associate with the Mullins incident.

The first concerned the cab’s driver. He had been found with his throat slit, floating facedown in the East River two days after the Mullins incident. It was the dearth of any hint of serious follow-up into his homicide that made this point stand out. The second was an attached complaint made to the cab company where the driver had worked, which had been turned over to the police. A man from New Jersey had gone out of his way to report a rude exchange that had taken place immediately before the Mullins incident and across from the theater where Mullins had been just prior to his death. What made this so important was a description of a man in the front passenger seat of the cab. In addition to holding a device that looked like a game station, according to the complainant, this passenger spoke with a Jamaican accent.

Easing back in his seat, Andy sighed. He now not only knew the two incidents were linked but also why people back in the UK were concerned about Mullins’s death. The police report concerning the cabbie’s death ended with the statement by the detective investigating it that he was awaiting a report from the FBI on several sets of fingerprints lifted from the front passenger side of the cab, which had been forwarded to the FBI before pursuing the case any further.

Looking across the table at Susan, Andy drew her attention away from the report on the Mullins incident she had been poring over in an effort to see if there were any hidden nuggets of information someone at the department had overlooked or discounted. “Any chance of finding out from the FBI who those prints belong to?”

Making a face, Susan thought for a moment before answering. “The bureau and I are not on the best of terms at the moment.”

“What did you do to piss them off?”

Susan snickered. “You don’t want to know.” Then, after drawing in a deep breath, she frowned. “Just how important is it that you find out?”

Had the part about the passenger in the cab not made mention that he was Jamaican, Andy wouldn’t have pressed the matter. But the point had been raised, which led Andy to wonder if this was what had the people who’d put Telford on the case worried. “Very,” he finally replied evenly.

Coming to her feet, Susan took a moment to look down at Andy. His deadpan, no-nonsense expression told her all she needed to know. “I’ll do my best.”

Andy nodded. “I couldn’t ask for more from you.”

No sooner had those words left his mouth than he regretted having said them. As if to drive this point home, Susan raised an eyebrow and gave him one of her lopsided smiles before heading over to her desk and picking up the phone.

The list Susan handed Andy an hour later confirmed Andy’s and, he expected, Telford’s worst fears. The passenger had not been Jamaican but Belizean. Even worse, the man was a former member of that country’s police special branch. If the FBI knew this, Andy had no doubt in his mind that his own security service and the Foreign Office did, as well.

Before he allowed his mind to run riot, playing out all sorts of Machiavellian plots that had been hatched between the United States and the UK designed to put a lid on the Mullins incident and make it go away when the identity of the cab’s passenger had been established, Andy turned to Susan. She’d already read the fax sent by someone she was unwilling to identify. Based on her expression, he could tell she had managed to reach the same conclusion he had.

Andy sat there going over everything they’d seen thus far as he took to rubbing his eyes due to the jet lag that was finally starting to catch up with him. No wonder people wanted this closed down tight. The conspiracy theorists would have a field day if it got into the open, and — for once, perhaps — they could very well be right. A tentative knock intruded on Andy’s thoughts. Looking up, he caught sight of Tommy staring at him from the door.

“Yeah?”

“I’ve just finished an initial look-see with Oklahoma. We need to talk.”

Andy looked up at Susan G. “Can I borrow your office for a moment? I need to have a private chat with Tommy.”

Knowing just how sensitive this whole affair was beginning to turn out to be and wishing to have a private word of her own with Jenny, Susan nodded and pulled herself to her feet. “Mi casa es su casa.”

She had no sooner than closed the door behind her when Tommy took to overwhelming Andy with details about the black box he’d plucked from the wrecked Town Car, details he really didn’t care to know.

“You’re going to love this, boss. It’s a Raspberry Pi running a bespoke flavor of Linux,” Tommy proclaimed happily as he waved a scratched and dented black metal case wrapped with masking tape under Andy’s nose. “Once they had this little puppy properly wired into the back of the target vehicle’s diagnostic port, the gits who did this had themselves a full-scale RC car. I have four of the little beauties myself,” Tommy added brightly as he stared lovingly at the battered piece of hardware. “I also imaged the SD memory card for Spence to have a look when we get back, but if you’d like, I can show you how easy it is to hook it up to someone’s car and give you the ride of your life.”

“Thanks, but no thanks,” Andy replied dryly. “What can you tell me about its origin? Were there any markings on it that can be used to trace it to its source and possibly help in tracking it from manufacturer to end user?”

Tommy barked out a sharp laugh. “It’s a Raspberry Pi, boss,” he exclaimed as if what he’d just said was supposed to mean something to Andy. When Tommy saw the look on his face that told him it didn’t, he took to explaining. “It’s only been around for a couple of years, and already there are millions of the little buggers out there. Whoever modified this one spent a lot of time and effort to erase any serial numbers on the motherboard. However, guess where the majority of these are sold?”

“Hmm, that’s a real toughie. My guess would be China.”

“Nah, the UK,” Tommy continued. “But it’s the case that really takes the biscuit. It isn’t an off-the-shelf protective shell; it’s been handcrafted in aluminum with just enough space inside for this stuff.” With a flourish, Tommy pulled what at first sight appeared to be a thin reddish slab the size of a small Hershey bar wrapped in food wrap from his other pocket.

Andy had to stop himself from jerking back at the sight, trying to tell himself not even Tommy was that stupid. “Is that what I think it is?”

“Yep,” Tommy grinned as he casually slapped the packet down on Susan G.’s desk whilst his eyes never left his boss’s face. “A nice bit of thermite. The lad who built this really didn’t want anyone to track it back to him by analyzing his techniques and signature, the kind everyone who puts together something like this leaves behind. Pity for him the igniter didn’t work.”

Andy pulled his eyes up from the innocuous-looking sachet of powder. “And you brought it in here?” he asked disbelievingly.

“Hey, it was in my bloody pocket!” Tommy grinned evilly as he picked his prize back up and casually returned it to the aforesaid pocket. “But you should have seen the look on Oklahoma’s face when I cracked open the case. Did you know that cute little thing was a marine?”

“Is a marine,” Andy muttered as he slowly shook his head and rubbed his eyes, which were beginning to feel like they’d been sandblasted. “Telford’s going to love this.”

Only when Andy had weaned everything of value out of Tommy and Susan’s assistant about the black box that had been pulled from the wrecked Town Car did Andy send him and Oklahoma off to find a quiet spot, a place where they could get rid of all the evidence that they had ever seen the damn device. Though Andy didn’t ask, as he was stifling a yawn, he could tell from the look in Tommy’s eye that the little bag of thermite was probably going to be involved in whatever it was he had in mind.

With that taken care of, he turned to Susan G. “I didn’t realize what I was dragging you into. I’m sorry.”

“So it’s just like the good old days, say what?” Again the half smile accompanied by a slight lift of eyebrow reminded him that Susan G. hadn’t really changed.

“As much as I’d love to call it a night and go back to the hotel, I need to send something to the UK pronto. The trouble is,” Andy quickly added as he looked back at the table where the two police reports sat, “given what we’ve just seen, I really don’t trust any of the gear I came with. Any chance I can lay my hands on a clean, preloaded data SIM card and a GSM dongle at this time of night?”

Susan G.’s smile grew broader as she dropped her chin a smidge and gave him one of her “get real” looks. “You do realize you’re in New York?”

“Yeah?”

“The city that never sleeps?” Only when she saw the cogs turning painfully slowly and remembering Andy was probably suffering from jet lag did she finally take pity on him. “Grab your coat, old bean. We’re going shopping.”

By the time Tommy and Oklahoma got back, both grinning like schoolkids and smelling faintly like a bonfire, Andy was pecking away at a battered secondhand laptop with a brand-new GSM dongle plugged in.

“Telford?” Tommy asked as soon as he had managed to persuade Oklahoma that what he really needed was a cup of tea that she was more than happy to go off and fetch.

“Yep,” Andy muttered without bothering to look up from his typing.

“Unencrypted?”

“Not a cat in hell’s chance. I had Spence make a bootable USB preloaded with GnuPG and a set of one-time public and private keys before we left.” With a grunt, he hit the Send button and leaned back to review his last instructions, hoping he had struck just the right balance between instilling caution and not scaring the hell out of the girl.

Tommy flopped down in the chair opposite as Andy dropped the lid of the laptop. “So what now?”

“We wait,” Andy muttered dryly.

“For what?”

“If we’re lucky, a thanks from Ed for a job well done and a strongly worded suggestion that we hurry home.”

“Or?” Tommy ventured when he saw the worried expression Andy wasn’t able to keep in check.

Having no wish to go into that, Andy drew himself up. “I daresay we owe Susan and Oklahoma dinner. If you’re up to it, I say we wrap things up here, head on out, and pay up.”

Realizing he wasn’t about to get a straight answer from Andy, Tommy nodded. “Sounds good to me, provided you’re paying.”

“I’m not paying. Some nameless bureaucrat back in London is.”

“All the better,” Tommy beamed.

Having followed Andy’s instructions to the letter and having received no questions or comments from Telford that she needed to encrypt and send back, Spence sent a quick text from her mobile to let Andy know the package had been delivered. Then, having faithfully followed her instructions to destroy the original and trash the old laptop she had set up for communications, and knowing there wasn’t anything to eat back at her flat that struck her fancy, she treated herself the way she often did when she wished to take a break from her usual routine. While dinner at a decent little pizzeria she frequented followed by a film might not have struck most young women her age as a big night on the town, for Spence, it was as close to lavish indulgence as she ever went.

The serenity of a stress-free evening spent out and about on her own was shattered the second she opened the door of her flat and discovered it had been ransacked. Pausing in the open doorway, she hesitated but a second as she wondered if it would be best if she backed out and called the police or ventured in to see if things were as bad as they appeared to be. Ordinarily, she would have done what most sane and rational women would have and gone with the first option. It was what she’d done earlier and the nature of the message she had carried to Telford that caused her to appreciate straight off she just might be dealing with something that was anything but ordinary.

It was the presence of her flat-screen television and the absence of a trio of computers that clued her in this had not been a job committed by a run-of-the-mill thug. Whoever had been through the place, she concluded, had either been the world’s most discriminating thieves or had been very selective in what they took. With that thought in mind, Spence laughed slightly manically at her own joke. If it was the latter, going to the police might be almost as dumb as going back to Telford and demanding to know what in the hell was going on. Dealing with that arrogant prick was something she decided was best left to Andy.

Having settled on what she hoped was the wisest course of action, she made her way into her flat, closed the door, and took to assessing the situation even as she was pulling out her mobile and calling the number to a second mobile Andy always kept close at hand that only she and Tommy had the number to.

“Are you sure you don’t want me to go with you, boss?” Tommy asked as he watched Andy stuff his clothing into his carry-on with more vigor than the task called for.

Andy didn’t bother looking over to where Tommy sat perched on the edge of his hotel room bed. “No, definitely not. The last thing I need is an irate taffy at my side when I meet with Telford.”

“I’d have thought that would be the first thing you’d want, given what he’s done to Tinker Bell.”

Looking up, Andy paused as his eyes met Tommy’s. “We don’t know Telford was the one who ordered the brute squad to toss Spence’s flat.”

“Give me a break, will ya?” Tommy muttered dismissively. “Even if he didn’t give the order himself, just by passing on what we’ve found to whoever it was that set this show in motion makes the bastard as guilty as the nasty little shites who tossed Spence’s flat. You know that as well as I do.”

In no mood to argue, Andy sighed. “Just do me a favor and don’t follow me, not until I give you an all clear.”

“And what exactly am I supposed to do?”

“You’re always talking about trying to beat the house with that system you’ve been working on these past few months,” Andy suggested as he went back to packing. “Why don’t you go out to Vegas and give it a whirl?”

In the twinkling of an eye, Tommy’s face lit up. “Yeah,” he murmured as he took to considering Andy’s proposal. “Yeah. I think I’ll do that.”

Pleased he’d managed to set Tommy charging off on a tangent, Andy checked his watch. Knowing Susan G. would be waiting to take him to the airport out on the street, double parked as usual, he zipped up his carry-on, took a quick look about to make sure he hadn’t left anything, and headed for the door. “Just you take care,” he warned Tommy as he was leaving. “Casino owners in Vegas don’t take kindly to people who set out to cheat them of their ill-gotten gains.”

Before Tommy was able to reply, Andy was gone, leaving him wondering who had more to worry about: himself and any possible run-ins he might have with casino security or Edward Telford once Andy had the bastard in his sights. Telford, Tommy finally concluded with a happy smile. A man didn’t survive back-to-back tours in Northern Ireland doing what Andy had done there without becoming something of a heartless bastard himself when he needed to be.

With nothing else to do for the balance of the evening other than make reservations on the first available flight to Vegas and book a room there, Tommy decided this was as good a time as any to find out what was so special about Susan G. O’Conner. Firing up his laptop, he browsed the Web, using all the usual search tools he relied on in order to find out about a person’s past. When he came up with nothing he already didn’t know, he tried a search that included only the terms O’Conner and NYPD. The only thing that came close was a series of old newspaper articles that spoke of an NYPD detective named O’Conner who had been wounded in the line of duty.

What convinced him he had found what he was looking for were the photos of the two detectives. Easing back away from the screen as he gazed at the photo of detective first grade O’Banyon and detective second grade O’Conner, Tommy snickered. “Well, I’ll be damned.”

When he spotted Andy from behind, sitting on a bench in Battersea Park right where he said he would be, Edward Telford hesitated. The idea of turning around and slinking away, while inviting, would have only made the tirade he had no hope of avoiding worse. With this thought in mind, the former Guards officer drew himself up and headed over to the bench where he took a seat.

“Listen, Andy, I’m terribly sorry things were as badly mismanaged as they were,” Telford began when his friend didn’t open the conversation as he had expected. “Had I known someone was going to go after your girl as they did, I never would have involved you in this whole sordid affair.”

For the longest time, Andy said nothing. When he did finally break his silence, his voice was very calm, as if he were discussing the weather. “I expect you heard all the rumors that went about at the time regarding how that Provo who set off a bomb next to the Londonderry school playground that claimed the lives of all those children met his end?”

Glancing over at Andy out of the corner of his eye, Telford nodded. “I did.”

Ever so slowly, Andy twisted about until he was facing Telford. “Well, let me tell you, mate,” he muttered in a tone that sent a chill down Telford’s spine, “if I find out who did that to one of mine, what happened to him will pale by comparison.”

Telford knew better than to shrug off such a threat, not when it was made by a man with Andy Webb’s reputation. The urge to ask him if he had found anything else concerning the Mullins incident was forgotten as he watched Andy come to his feet and walk away without another word. In this case, Telford decided self-preservation firmly trumped his obligation to queen and country.

Besides, Telford concluded as he also came to his feet and retreated in the opposite direction Andy had taken, he’d got all he imagined he could reasonably expect Andy to be able to find, and then some. If the people he’d been tasked to look into the matter needed more information, they had other, more capable resources they could draw on.

Well, Telford reminded himself as he left the park. Maybe not as capable, but from my standpoint, a damned sight safer to employ.

While watching Fox News one morning as I ate breakfast, I saw a story about a study conducted by a pair of University of Pittsburgh professors on how easy it was to hack into a car’s computer system and take control of all the key functions away from the driver. An article in the August 2011 edition of Car and Driver entitled “Can Your Car Be Hacked” as well as a 3 September 2013 AP story by Tom Krisher entitled “Hackers Find a Weakness in Car Computer Systems” served to confirm that this was not only possible but actually quite easy.

It was a chance observation that set the creative storytelling wheels turning. One night, while waiting for my sister to come out of a Broadway show, I saw a pair of black Lincoln Town Cars parked between a pair of NYPD patrol cars. It was the gaggle of plainclothes security types who were not doing such a great job of being inconspicuous, as well as the presence of so many world leaders attending a general session at the UN that led me to conclude there were some high-speed VIPs watching the same show my sister was.

The final element that brought this together is the way conspiracy theorists continue to find new and inventive ways of blaming the death of Princess Diana on the British government. Whether or not this is an efficient way of doing someone in can be debated. That it is possible is all that matters.

HAROLD COYLE

In 2013, Dr. Charlie Miller and Chris Valasek presented a paper at the DEF CON event on hacking cars. It had taken them nine months of hard work to achieve it, but their results were staggering. “We could control steering, braking, acceleration to a certain extent, seat belts, lights, horn, speedometer, gas gauge,” said Valasek. And whilst some observers may consider the chance of assassination by remote control car extremely unlikely, others think it has already been done and point to the suspicious circumstances surrounding the death of journalist Michael Hastings the same year.

One of the hardest problems any would-be cyberassassin would face is finding suitable hardware to plug in to the target vehicle’s data bus, the network that links all the computers inside a car together. It must be small enough to conceal, easily programmable, readily and cheaply available, and, of course, almost impossible to trace. Enter the Raspberry Pi. Initially designed as a cheap and easily configurable computer to reintroduce young people to the joys of programming in the UK, it has quickly gained an almost cult status among hobbyists globally. On sale for about fifty dollars, by the end of 2013, over two million units have been shipped worldwide to accommodate a vast range of programming projects that have come to rely on it, some of which are educational and fun, others not quite so innocent.

I imagine there are readers who might consider Andy’s methods to protect his transatlantic communications somewhat paranoid, but that probably depends on whether you read the UK’s Guardian newspaper. The use of a disposable pay-as-you-go data SIM card — purchased with cash, of course — is a good start. But it also helps to ensure your GSM device’s built-in International Mobile Station Equipment Identity, or IMEI, is also “clean” and has not been linked to you previously. An old laptop that you can later trash is also a good thought, but Andy goes one step further and has a bootable USB flash drive that Spence had prebuilt for him with an operating system, e-mail, and encryption software, all of which are readily available as open-source utilities, such as Thunderbird and GnuPG. Even then, a final bit of paranoia kicks in. Why did he insist on his letter being printed out on an ancient dot matrix printer? Simple. Almost all modern printers have both memory and computers inside. If you look, you’d be amazed at what you can find in a printer’s memory. Like elephants and creditors, they never forget.

JENNIFER ELLIS

In her six years as a surveillance officer at the Casino Martinique, Maria Cisneros had earned something of a well-deserved reputation for being able to spot cheaters or scammers in record time. At the moment, however, that reputation was on the line, for she found herself having one hell of a time trying to discern how the man wearing a tweed jacket and rumpled khaki trousers was able to walk away from three different poker games a big winner without her being able to discern how he was cheating, or if in fact he was. That he could simply be a professional who was preying on rabbits, rank amateurs who came to Vegas to enjoy a serious game of poker with likeminded people or to see if they could beat the big boys, could not be discounted. Either way, the pit manager was concerned with the character Cisneros had come to refer to as Mr. Tweed.

It didn’t take long before she was able to see he didn’t have a colleague at the table who was either swapping cards with him or in a position that allowed him to read the hands of the other players and pass that information on to Mr. Tweed. Mr. Tweed was also not a mechanic, a player who used sleight-of-hand techniques to improve his odds of winning. Only after she had worked her way through the entire list of known techniques without being able to come up with an answer did she call her shift supervisor over to see if he could unravel this mystery.

Ambling over to the console where Cisneros was monitoring a trio of screens, each with a different view of Mr. Tweed, Jack Hughes placed a hand on the back of her seat and leaned over. “Don’t tell me Maria the Magnificent, the undisputed queen of the surveillance room, is having a spot of trouble,” he whispered in her ear.

Though annoyed by Hughes’s use of the moniker her coworkers had for her, Cisneros sighed as her shoulders slumped. “I’m afraid so, boss man. This one’s got me and the pit manager stumped.”

“What’s he been doing?” Hughes asked as his eyes darted from screen to screen, carefully watching how the player in question was dealing the cards to the others at his table.

“He’s been playing hit and run all night, going from table to table after he’s won a big hand,” Cisneros explained as she too watched a CCTV screen, now tightly focused on the way Mr. Tweed was handling the cards. “Each time he moves to a new table after cashing in most of his chips, he starts by playing small, throwing in only what he needs to in order to stay in the game awhile, even if he does have a good hand. Then wham! He goes all in when there’s a big pot on the table and he’s sure he has a winning hand.”

Like Cisneros, Hughes could see the player they were watching was dealing correctly. It was only when he’d finished doing so and after he’d taken a long, hard look at his own cards that Hughes saw a tell he hadn’t seen in decades. “Son of a bitch!” he muttered before chuckling to himself.

Unsure why her supervisor was acting the way he was as they watched Mr. Tweed use the pinkie of his left hand to pick his nose, Cisneros frowned. “What?”

“Can you give me a close-up of his face?” Hughes asked.

Without bothering to answer him, Cisneros zoomed in on Mr. Tweed’s round face that was as dispassionate and inscrutable as a member of the Imperial Chinese Guard.

Straightening up, Hughes used the hand he’d been resting on Cisneros’s seat to give her a pat on her shoulder. “Tell the pit manager to relax. I’ll handle this one myself.”

“If you say so, boss man.”

As he was leaving the surveillance room, Hughes called out over his shoulder to no one in particular, “If anyone asks, tell them I’m on my dinner break.”

With his full attention focused on the garishly made-up octogenarian across from him who always stopped talking about her grandchildren whenever she had a good hand, Tommy Tyler didn’t notice Jack Hughes coming up behind him until he spoke. “Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, you have to walk into mine, you wretched little taffy.”

Over the years, Tommy had come to appreciate there were some people who were totally forgettable, the sort who came into his life and out again quicker than a greasy burger. Jack Hughes wasn’t one of them. Memories of a character like him were the kind that didn’t diminish one jot over the years.

Taking care to lay his cards facedown on the table, Tommy turned in his seat, ignoring the glare from the player to his right when his knee brushed against one of the man’s legs.

“Your joint?” Tommy intoned playfully as he rose from his seat to greet a friend he hadn’t seen in over fifteen years.

“In a way, it is,” Hughes replied as he reached out to accept Tommy’s hand. “I’m the senior surveillance supervisor.”

“You? Someone hired you to keep an eye out for miscreants like me?”

“It’s a dirty job, but someone has to do it.” Hughes grinned as he continued to match the way Tommy was pumping his hand. “What do you say the two of us head off to one of the restaurants, order the biggest slab of beef they have, and catch up on old times?”

“Love to, as soon as I finish this hand,” Tommy replied as he tried to pull his hand away from Hughes.

“Oh, I don’t think the nice people here would mind if you called it a night,” came the response as he glanced over Tommy’s shoulder at the other players seated at the table without releasing the grip on his friend’s hand.

“You back rooming me?” Tommy asked as he cocked a brow.

“Me? No. I don’t do that sort of thing. They do,” he replied, tilting his head off to one side to where a couple of uniformed security officers were standing side by side just behind a casino pit manager with a scowl on his face, all of whom were watching their every move.

“Well, since you put it that way, I guess I will take you up on your kind invitation.” With that, Tommy managed to free his hand, collect his winnings, and left a tableful of tourists and wannabe card sharks scurrying to collect their own chips and flee before someone came by and took them away.

The restaurant Hughes led Tommy to was a steak house located within the casino. Over a couple of juicy prime cuts and baked potatoes the size of a football used by the mini rugby league, the two men caught up on what each of them had been up to after they’d left the army.

“I tried the police for a while, but it didn’t suit me,” Hughes explained. “It was too much like the army, with the added disadvantage of not affording you an opportunity for a change of scene every now and then.”

“And you get that here, in the middle of what the Americans call a desert?” Tommy asked incredulously as he was about to shovel an oversized piece of beef into his mouth.

“Oh, the scenery this place offers is far better than any the regiment ever offered us,” Hughes shot back as his eyes cut over to a table of young, smartly dressed women who were obviously enjoying a girls’ weekend in Vegas.

“And what does your wife say about your bird-watching?” Tommy grinned as one of the girls, a fair-haired lass with a pair of legs that went on forever, caught him staring at her. By way of response, she smiled and gave him a wicked little wink.

“‘Where’s my alimony check, you bastard?’”

“Oh,” was all Tommy could think of as he turned his attention back to Hughes.

“It’s not all that bad,” Hughes countered. “She was tired of my nomadic ways. Wanted a little place where she could grow her precious flowers and play with her grandchildren when my Emma finally settles down and finds a man that she considers to be good enough for her.”

Tommy chuckled. “Good luck there, mate. If I recall right, that girl of yours has your gypsy blood. She’ll never settle down.”

“I don’t know,” Hughes opined. “Girls are different, you know.”

“I hadn’t noticed,” Tommy replied dryly as he glanced over to see if the fair-haired girl was still watching him.

“How about you?” Hughes asked when he noticed what Tommy was up to. “Other than the obvious, what have you been up to over the years?”

“I guess you could say I finally settled down, after a fashion.” With that, Tommy related how, after the Gulf War in ’91, he’d left the army, as well, drifting from job to job until a man he’d never given a second thought to walked into the electronics shop he was working in at the time and made him an offer he couldn’t refuse. “For a former Green Jacket and a guy who considers living like a Roman soldier fun, Andy Webb is amazingly switched on when it comes to computers and such. It’s his knack for putting two and two together and always coming up with five that caused me to throw in with ’im.”

Tommy’s revelation that he was employed by a cybersecurity firm and the memory of how he was able to take one look at a complex system and figure out how it worked in no time flat caused Hughes to pause as he mulled a thought over in his head.

Never one to miss a tell that was as obvious as the one Hughes betrayed, Tommy leaned back in his seat, knitted his fingers together over his stomach, and grunted, “All right, you filthy Welshman, what’s going on in that head of yours?”

“I’ve got a problem you just might be able to help me with.”

“I’m on holiday, you know,” Tommy shot back when he realized Hughes had just left memory lane and was now edging his way onto another path, one Tommy suspected just might be profitable.

“If you’re still as good as you used to be, I’m sure we’ll be able to find a way of making it well worth your while.”

“We?”

Realizing he’d let his hand show prematurely, Hughes harrumphed. “Let’s say we finish up here and go up to my office. I’ve something I would like you to take a look at.”

Tommy was considering his answer when he noticed the girls at the table he’d been eyeing were getting up and preparing to leave. When the faired-haired one he’d been flirting with walked away without looking back at him, he sighed as he reached out and took up his beer. “Well, seeing how I’ve been banished from the card room, I might as well.”

Though Hughes had watched the way his friend had been eyeing the girl and knew his disappointment had nothing to do with being “advised” to stop playing and call it a night, he didn’t let on. Vegas was, after all, about dreams, some of which had nothing at all to do with gambling, at least not the sort that involved games of chance.

For Tommy, there was nothing quite like being afforded an opportunity to spend time in a room crammed with computers. Like a child in a toy store, he found he could not help but be impressed and excited in equal parts by the layout and sophistication of Casino Martinique’s system used to keep an eye on every aspect of the casino’s operations from the surveillance control room Jack Hughes ran. It relied on more than cameras to track the activities of the casino’s patrons. From the time they entered the Martinique until they had left it, more often than not considerably poorer, a number of systems and sensors collected information from casino-issued smart cards to the Wi-Fi signals emitted by the patrons’ own mobiles.

“Welcome to my world,” Hughes declared as he and Tommy stood behind the rows of surveillance officers seated at desks on which multiple monitors were set. All the desks, including the one at the rear of the room Hughes went over to, faced a wall covered with a battery of monitors of various sizes, including one oversized screen right in the middle.

“Quite a little setup you’ve got here,” Tommy muttered as his eyes darted about, taking in some unique details he’d never seen before that he wanted to take a closer look at, provided he was afforded an opportunity to do so.

“It beats the hell of the Scimitar they used to cram the two of us into,” Hughes muttered as his eyes swept the room, looking for any hint the people he was responsible for weren’t paying attention to what they were being paid to do or were engaged in an activity not sanctioned or condoned by the casino’s owner.

Noticing a familiar look, Tommy chuckled. “I expect you have your hands full keeping this lot ploughing a straight furrow.”

Glancing over at his friend out of the corner of his eye, Hughes grinned. He was pleased his suspicions about Tommy Tyler had been spot on. He’d not lost what many back in the regiment had thought was an almost supernatural ability to spot things they were oblivious to. Whether it be spoil from a freshly dug fighting position an inattentive foe had left in plain view, the one loose connection in a wiring harness of a crippled vehicle, or the way people were behaving, Tommy had used his ability to latch on to the minutest detail, neatly fitting it into an overall picture that made sense to him and, more importantly, could be taken advantage of. He relied on this ability when playing the sort of head games all enlisted men engaged in when dealing with NCOs and officers, or using it to give him a nearly unbeatable edge when playing poker by studying the habits and behaviors of the people he was up against. Like a hawk perched high above the fray, Tommy would patiently study his intended prey before swooping down when, and only when, he was sure of a quick, clean kill.

“Funny you should mention that,” Hughes muttered in a low voice before turning his back on his people, going over to his desk at the rear of the room, and taking a seat. “There’s something I’d like you to look at.”

Having assumed there was more behind his friend’s invitation to allow him to see a room that came close to rivaling the NSA’s ability to monitor the activities of the people it was pledged to defend and protect, Tommy nodded. “Sure thing.”

As Tommy was settling into a seat Hughes had pulled over next to his, Hughes scrolled through his files until he came upon one that archived the activities of the casino’s online gambling site. “Our Web poker games pull in more in a single day than the card room does in a week,” Hughes stated as he was searching for a file. “The programs we rely on to ensure it is secure from hacking or manipulation are state of the art. We’re always on the lookout for anything that even hints at being out of the norm. When we do come across an anomaly, especially a recurring one, we either sort it out ourselves or we bring in an outside firm that deals with such things to find out what’s going on.”

“A firm like the one I work for,” Tommy interjected by way of reminding Hughes he was neither a free agent when it came to dealing with cyber-related security matters nor willing to do something for free that Andy normally charged for, not even for a mate he’d ridden into battle with.

“I expect, yes,” Hughes mused while he was opening a file. “Despite our best efforts, every now and then, something comes along that stymies our in-house experts as well as the techno-nerds my boss relies on to keep us ahead in the high-stakes game of can-you-beat-the-house. Now, tell me what you see,” he continued as he eased back in his seat to allow Tommy a better view of the screenshot he’d pulled up.

The scene on the monitor displayed a virtual overhead shot of a game of straight poker in progress. Other than the user names displayed at the seats currently occupied, the current bets made by each of those players, and the faces of the cards being held by one of the players, the one who had access to this particular screenshot, nothing else was showing. Right off, Tommy inspected the cards that were being displayed. It was not a particularly impressive hand, consisting of the ace of hearts, king of hearts, queen of clubs, ten of hearts, and the two of clubs. Next, he took his time as he went from one user name to the next, trying to see if any of them could be a clue as to who was playing, what they were up to, or if they spelled something out when combined. When he could see nothing that betrayed a discernible message, he looked at the bets each of the players had placed. It was only then that he noticed anything resembling a pattern.

“Let me see the next hand that was played in this game,” Tommy asked quietly without taking his eyes off the screen.

Without a word, Hughes reached out with his right hand, scrolled down the list of screenshots to the next one, and clicked the mouse.

This time, Tommy’s attention was immediately drawn to the bets. Still, before asking Hughes to show him the next screen, he inspected the cards being displayed as well as the user names. He did the same with the third screenshot, but he stopped looking at the cards or the user names, focusing his entire attention on the bets as Hughes progressed from one round to the next.

For his part, the dispassionate expression he’d affected ever so slowly morphed into a knowing grin as Hughes realized Tommy had caught on to the quirk that made this particular group of players stand out. Still, he kept his own council, waiting until Tommy had decided he’d seen enough.

“Well,” Tommy finally intoned. “Either you have a group of grannies who are on the dole playing this game or the bets are being used to transmit a message. How many of these types of games are there, and how often do these particular users play?”

Easing back into his seat once more, Hughes knitted his fingers together and brought his hands to rest on a paunch that had long ago lost all definition. “These particular players show up on our website about once a week. Though they change their screen names every few months, it’s the way they bet, regardless of what hand is being played, that’s caused the algorithm we use to sniff out quirky behavior to flag this lot. What we can’t figure out is what kind of code this is.”

“Ever hear of JN-25?” Tommy asks his friend.

“Can’t say that I have. What kind of program is it?”

“It’s not a computer program. It was a cipher the Jap navy used in World War II. It was made up of words, phrases, numbers, and letters that were each assigned to a set of numbers. The sender looked up the word or phrase he wanted to use in a code book, found the numbers next to it, and encrypted the numbers when sending the message. All the addressee needed to do was look up the numbers and write down the word or phrase they represented.”

Hughes, having worked with contractors and sales reps of software companies long enough to be leery of someone who came up with an answer as quickly as his friend had just done, remained skeptical. “Since when have you become a history buff?”

“Since I started working for someone with a desk across from mine who likes to pass the time rambling on about why Hannibal was completely daft for even thinking about taking elephants across the Alps and thinks spending a weekend perched on Hadrian’s Wall dressed like a Roman soldier is as close to heaven on earth as you can get.”

“I know what you mean.” Hughes snickered before returning to the matter at hand. “Try spending all your time around jokers who live, eat, and sleep nothing but gambling and how to keep people from cheating the casinos built to cheat them out of their life savings.” After a pause, during which Hughes waited for Tommy to continue with the point he had been making without him doing so, he sighed. “Okay, I’m game. What makes you think the bets are a code?”

“I’m willing to wager you another free meal at that posh restaurant we ate in,” Tommy declared with an air of confidence. “I expect if you were to go back and look at all the bets made by this crew that’s giving you the willies, you’ll find their bets all consist of five digits. Never any more, never any less.”

Hughes didn’t need to go back and look. He already knew this to be the case. “Okay, so someone is using the game to send messages back and forth. That’s easy enough to fix. Even I can stop that.”

Tommy looked away from the monitor a moment and took to regarding his friend out of the corner of his eye even as something of a plan began to gel in his head. “I wouldn’t advise that, mate. Not until you find out who these blighters are and what they’re up to.”

“I expect you’re going to tell me why I need to worry about that.”

“I will, but not here,” Tommy replied as he glanced about the room, taking note once more of one of Hughes’s people, who had been doing a pathetic job of pretending he wasn’t watching them. “All this high-powered thinking has left my throat parched.”

“Should I even bother to ask who’s buying?”

“You can always ask, mate, but it’ll be a waste of time, since I’m sure you already know the answer,” Tommy shot back with a sly wink as they both came to their feet and headed for the door.

In a quiet booth tucked away in the corner of one of the casino’s bars, Tommy took his time to explain to his friend why he needed to find out who was using the poker games as a way of passing messages. “Whoever came up with this system has dedicated a whole lot of time, money, and brainpower generating the code books and distributing them. They’re not about to abandon the system simply because you freeze them out. They’ll just go to another outfit’s site and carry on.”

“So long as they’re not here, what do I care?” Hughes replied offhandedly before taking a sip of his beer.

“Two reasons,” Tommy explained as he was holding up two fingers of his right hand in front of his friend’s face. “First, these people are probably up to something that is not in the best interest of your adopted country. Whether they’re druggies or terrorists doesn’t matter.” Pausing, Tommy thought about that a second before he corrected himself. “Well, it does matter. Given my druthers, I’d rather they be druggies. You can avoid that lot if you’re careful. Hopped-up hajjis, on the other hand, would love to pay a visit to a place like this to make a statement and wreak havoc on the people who messed with their system and extract a bit of vengeance before cashing in on the seventy-two-virgins deal.”

Tommy allowed this thought to sink in as he took another slurp of his beer before continuing. “The second reason is connected to the first in a roundabout way. Let’s just say the people who are passing messages are martyrs in waiting, using your system to post messages to each other or, even more likely, the leader of a group passing on orders to various cells. In the wake of a major attack, when the people at the NSA stop reading Kim Kardashian’s e-mails and turn their attention to figuring out how they missed the warning signs, they’ll trace the hajjis’ traffic back to you. If your site was the first one they used, I imagine you’d come under some heavy-duty scrutiny, the kind I expect your boss, his partners, and their accountants are keen on avoiding.”

“No doubt about that,” Hughes muttered. “If you think the lads who work for HMG’s Revenue and Customs can be brutal, try dealing with the American IRS.”

“And finally,” Tommy added as his face lit up with a broad, toothy grin. “Think of the plaudits you and your boss will get if you manage to uncover a covey of nasty little bastards intent doing more than running about crying ‘Death to America!’ for the TV cameras.”

After staring down at his beer and mulling over what his friend was saying, Hughes looked back up at Tommy. “That’s three reasons, mate. Are you auditioning for a Monty Python revival?”

Tommy gave his friend a wink. “Well, you know what they say — nobody ever expects the Spanish Inquisition.”

After sharing a good laugh over that, Hughes asked Tommy if he’d mind meeting the boss.

Making a show of being excited, Tommy leaned over the table toward his friend. “Bruce Springsteen? You know him?”

“Sean Woodard, ya bloody gork. If we’re going to go poking around where we don’t belong, I’m going to need your help and his permission.”

“And I’m going to need to be compensated for my time and troubles. Be advised, I’m not a cheap date.”

“You never were, you wretched little taffy.”

After sharing another round of laugher, the two men finished their beers. While Hughes was signing the check for the drinks, a check he would never need to pay, Tommy did his best to keep from smirking. Not because he was on the verge of extending his stay in Vegas without having to spend a single quid of his own. Rather, the opportunity to use and rummage about the state-of-the-art systems Hughes relied on was too good to pass up. While Andy always made sure he kept the systems and software they used back in the UK up to speed, sometimes investing in what Tommy thought to be obscene amounts of money on them, Tommy had learned over the years you could always pick up a trick or two by taking a quick peek into someone else’s toy box.

Finished with the waiter, Hughes turned to Tommy. “Ready to go, mate?”

“I am, provided the price is right.”

Rolling his eyes, Hughes shook his head. “You bloody mercenaries.”

“Hello, Pot. This is Kettle. Send color, over,” Tommy fired back as they were sliding out of the booth.

“I’ll need to talk this over with the boss first, to find out just how eager he is to solve this mystery.”

“I’m here all week,” Tommy replied. “Just do me a favor and the next time you decide to sneak up behind me and ruin a perfect setup, leave the Joe Pesci character and his friends behind.”

An early morning call the next day from Hughes woke Tommy from a peaceful slumber, one brought on by a long but successful night in the card room of another casino. Informed by his friend to meet him in the lobby of the hotel, Tommy expected to be taken to a plush office inside the Martinique. Instead, Hughes drove out of town to an impressive walled estate set atop a ridge with a spectacular view of Las Vegas. “This is only the third time I’ve been up here,” Hughes explained while they were waiting for the massive driveway gates to open. “Sean Woodard prefers to run his little empire from here, away from the day-to-day bump and grind. He comes down from Mount Olympus only when he needs to prove to the media he’s not being held captive by the mob or some unscrupulous Mormon business manager.”

“With a setup like this, you can hardly blame him,” Tommy muttered more to himself as he took in the opulent oasis perched on the otherwise barren landscape that Woodard called home.

After being met at the door by a young, fair-haired woman wearing a simple white shirtdress, Tommy and Hughes were led to a shaded patio where Sean Woodard was seated at a table. Coming to his feet, he greeted the two men by flashing them his signature smile and offering Tommy his hand.

“Would you care to join me for breakfast?” he asked without waiting for Hughes to introduce Tommy, leading Tommy to assume the notorious casino owner not only knew who he was but probably every single detail about him a man like Woodard considered worth knowing.

Never having been shy when it came to accepting an invitation to enjoy free food, Tommy grinned. “A man would have to be a fool to say no.”

Though he’d already had breakfast, Jack Hughes also accepted Woodard’s offer, but for entirely different reasons. Like everyone else who was a part of Sean Woodard’s world, Hughes knew you didn’t say no to him, not if you wished to remain working in the gaming industry.

“I’ve been told you and Jack served together in the Queen’s Dragoon Guards,” Woodard declared by way of opening up a casual, seemingly friendly dialogue.

“That’s right,” Tommy replied as he took up the glass of mimosa offered him by a young brunette in a white shirtdress exactly like the one the girl at the front door had been wearing. “The Welsh Cavalry, and proud of it,” he declared as he lifted his glass as if in a toast, one Hughes readily joined in on.

Woodard naturally thought Tommy’s brash behavior was all show, a brazen display of bravado meant to make it clear he was not in the least bit intimidated by his surroundings or Woodard himself. Little did the casino owner, a man who measured another’s worth in terms of the value he could add to his business concerns, appreciate Tommy and Jack Hughes were toasting others, men they’d served with who had long ago been added to their regiment’s roll of honor.

“Jack tells me you have a novel theory to explain the odd betting habits a group of players use on our website,” Woodard ventured as the brunette, assisted by yet a third young woman in a white shirtdress, set out before them a number of plates and bowls containing various breakfast foods.

“It’s not a theory, Mr. Woodard,” Tommy countered with a self-assuredness that came naturally to him even as he was spearing a fat, juicy banger with his fork. “The need for various scumbags to pass messages back and forth via the Internet without folks like your NSA knowing what they’re about is causing them to come up with all sorts of ingenious methods of doing so. This isn’t new. There are more than a few people in the intelligence community who believe al-Qaeda planned the 9/11 attacks on eBay using encrypted messages hidden within digital photos.”

For the first time, something Tommy said caused Woodard to react. Glancing over at Hughes, he frowned.

“It can be done, Mr. Woodard,” Hughes intoned. “Like I always tell the vendors who claim the software or hardware they’re pimping is foolproof, there’s nothing in this world that’s foolproof, since fools are so ingenious. I believe Mr. Tyler is right. The people we’re dealing with are no fools.”

“So,” Woodard continued after taking a moment to enjoy a mouthful of scrambled egg whites and spinach. “What do we do, provided we need to do anything? So far, I’ve been told this group has done nothing wrong. Their credit is good, and they adhere to all the rules governing play on our site.”

“Like I told Jack, it’s not what they’re doing to you that’s important. It’s what they might be doing to someone else and the possible repercussions that your business concerns, not to mention your reputation, might suffer if it’s discovered they were using your website to plan a sequel to 9/11. It’ll be even worse if, in the course of running this to ground, it’s discovered the scumbags had help from someone inside your organization facilitating whatever it is they’re up to.”

Again, Woodard glanced over at Hughes, who responded by doing nothing more than closing his eyes and nodding, indicating he agreed with the concerns Tommy was expressing.

With a feigned casualness that was as transparent as his smile, Woodard paused to enjoy his breakfast while mulling something over in his head. “Given your background, I imagine you have a solution,” he finally ventured offhandedly.

“Of course I do. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be bothering you this early in the morning.”

“And this solution of yours, just how much will it cost me?” Woodard asked with a well-measured nonchalance.

Tommy was ready for this. Having seen through the opaque manner with which both his friend and Woodard had approached the matter at hand, he had done the math in his head, calculations that took into account the nature of the threat, the site in question, and, most importantly, the client. He also saw this as an opportunity to prove to Andy he was more than capable of handling a case like this all on his own and, if he managed to pull this off, give him something new he could use to badger Tinker Bell with. Taking up the glass of mimosa the brunette never allowed to go dry, Tommy locked eyes with Woodard. “Twenty-five hundred a day.”

“Dollars or pounds?” Woodard asked.

Though he’d meant dollars, without batting an eye, Tommy replied. “Pounds, of course.”

After doing some quick calculations in his head, Woodard asked if that included his expenses. Tommy furrowed his brow. “Ordinarily, it would not.”

“I’ll tell you what,” Woodard shot back as he tended to when he believed he had an edge with someone he was negotiating with. “I’ll throw in a free suite of rooms, meals on the house, and use of a company car whenever you need it. Will that cover your personal needs while in town?”

Though this was exactly what he expected, Tommy made something of a show mulling over Woodard’s offer before responding. “Though I expect I’ll be in for a good bollocking when I tell my boss about that part of the deal, I don’t see how I can say no, Mr. Woodard.” Then Tommy frowned. “I will need to fly in my assistant.”

“Another Welshman?” Woodard asked in an effort to lighten the mood now that he’d managed to negotiate a solution to a problem at a cost far below what he’d been expecting to pay.

“Not even close,” Tommy snickered. “This girl is as American as Yorkshire pudding.”

Appreciating the stubby little Welshman was going along with his effort to conclude the business portion of their breakfast with a spot of humor, Woodard shrugged. “Well, in that case, by all means, count her in.”

Never having had an opportunity to go to Las Vegas, although she’d always promised herself a trip, let alone doing so via the private jet sent to pick her up, Jenny Garver was in a spectacularly good mood when she saw Tommy waiting for her at the terminal of Henderson Executive Airport. Flashing him the down-home country smile that he had found to be far more alluring than he expected she’d meant it to be, Jenny made straight to where he and Hughes were waiting.

When Tommy saw the oversized red duffel bag on wheels being pulled by a comely flight attendant in a white shirtdress following her, he cocked an eyebrow. “You do appreciate this isn’t going to take more than a few days,” he muttered as he took the duffel from the flight attendant and adjusted his grip to compensate for the bag’s weight.

Clutching the strap of her laptop’s carrier, a device Jenny never allowed to be out of her control, she tilted her head to one side. “What? Were you expecting me to go about as naked as a jaybird?”

Tommy grinned. “A man can always hope.”

Unfazed by the Welshman’s brashness, Jenny snickered. “Well, now I know part of the reason you asked Susan to send me out here. What’s the other part?”

“Jack here and I will fill you in on the way to the hotel,” he replied as he led the girl from Oklahoma out to the chauffeur-driven limousine he’d been given the use of for the duration of his stay.

Jenny waited until after she’d checked into her room and Hughes had gone to ask Tommy why he’d called on her instead of his own software expert. “In addition to being quite good at finding your way around the Internet, your boss told me your hobby is cryptography and cryptanalysis,” he offered.

Jenny shrugged. “I took a few courses in cryptography since I was thinking about going to work for the company but then chucked that idea out the window when Susan asked if I’d like to work for her.”

Having already concluded from working with him in New York that he was more hardware oriented, Jenny peppered him with a series of questions concerning what it was she would be looking for and what he wanted her to do once they’d found it. One question she didn’t ask, a question both she and Susan had pondered after Susan had agreed to Tommy’s request that she hire Jenny out for this job, was why he hadn’t called in Andy’s own software expert. Jenny couldn’t help but think Tommy, who had never missed an opportunity to engage in playfully suggestive banter with her while he had been in New York, thought he was simply trying to impress her with an over-the-top offer and first-class treatment he currently had access to in the hope he’d get lucky.

Susan thought otherwise. Tommy had struck him as more of a teddy bear than a wolf, though she did warn Jenny to keep her wits about her. What Susan suspected, in part due to a few things Andy had alluded to, was that things were not quite as cozy at Century Consulting as he would have liked. And while Tommy had worked well with Jenny, it did not take long for Susan to appreciate that putting up with his brash, almost brusque manner and personal habits that would have turned a goat’s stomach could get really old really fast. So it was more than the thousand dollars a day or a chance to reward Jenny for her efforts over the past few months that led Susan to agree to send Jenny out to Vegas. If truth be known, it was the opportunity to find out more about Andy’s operation as well as his personal life that she hoped Jenny would be able to weasel out of Tommy that tipped the scales. Had she known Tommy’s request was motivated by much the same line of reasoning, Susan G. probably would have said no.

Tommy’s insistence that he and Jenny work from an off-site location was endorsed by Hughes who, like Tommy, could not discount the possibility there was someone inside his own team who knew the online poker game was being used for purposes other than adding to Sean Woodard’s already considerable fortune. “They don’t necessarily need to be a part of the system,” he explained to Jenny, who had asked him how real such a threat was. “Far too many employees of the Martinique are paid well by all sorts of characters to do nothing more than turn a blind eye to what they’re up to or to be someplace else when they, the miscreants, walk through the doors.”

The room within the computer science department of the Las Vegas campus of the University of Nevada, which had been allocated to them for their use, came as a disappointment to Jenny, for she had been looking forward to working in what she called “the belly of the beast.” Still, the setup was, in her opinion, “not too shabby.”

Had anyone else said this, Tommy would have wondered about his or her sanity, for the room was in fact a lab where members of the computer science department’s faculty conducted research into the online behavior of organizations, government agencies, and, quite naturally, corporations like Woodard’s. “Mr. Hughes has been very generous to the university,” Hughes informed Tommy and Jenny as they were settling in at their respective workstations. “In addition to research on managing databases and data mining, they have generated some algorithms that have proven to be quite useful in maximizing the casino operations.”

“Translated into English, dear girl,” Tommy explained to Jenny without looking away from the computer monitor he was seated before, “Jack’s boss uses the school to come up with more efficient and novel ways of separating the people who visit his casino from their money.”

After tilting her head to one side and giving this response a moment’s thought, Jenny nodded. “Nothing wrong with that,” she chirped cheerily as she returned to logging in to the system. “Isn’t that what we’re doing to him?”

“We’re providing him a service,” Tommy shot back.

“I expect he sees what he does in the same light.”

Tommy was about to ask her how she figured that but decided to use this opportunity to strike off in an entirely different direction. “When I was in New York, you never did tell me how a country girl like you wound up working for someone like Susan G. in the big city.”

“You’re right, I didn’t,” Jenny replied without bothering to look away from the monitor.

After waiting several seconds for her to continue without her doing so, Tommy cleared his throat. “Well?”

“Well what?”

“How did the two of you find each other?”

“Oh, it’s a long story,” Jenny replied in a singsongy voice that told Tommy she had no intention of answering him. “Now, if you’re ready, what exactly is it we’re looking for?”

Realizing the young woman from Oklahoma wasn’t about to respond to his less-than-subtle inquiries into her boss’s past, Tommy filled her in on what he suspected and what he wanted her to look for.

Installing via a flash drive an open-source pattern-recognition program, which she’d spent several weeks tweaking, onto the system she was using, Jenny spent the rest of the afternoon playing around with various parameters as she hunted for discernible patterns, routines that were repeated in each of the games Tommy had given to her for analysis. Finally, she wandered off to find a coffee and a mosey around the campus, leaving her program chunking through her search strings. When she eventually returned an hour later, Tommy was about ready to bite her head off. Before he even got a word in, however, she plunked herself back down in front of the monitor, unlocked the screen saver, and lurched forward as something of a grin lit up her face. “Ah, there you are, you little sucker.”

“There’s what?”

“The key.”

“To the code?” Tommy asked incredulously.

“Yep! Well, at least one of them,” she corrected herself with scrupulous honesty.

Turning away from the monitor he’d been working from, Tommy slid his chair closer to Jenny’s. “Show me.”

“These people aren’t the brightest bulbs in the box, that’s for sure. They’re recycling their avatar names too often, along with the same crypto keys. By doing so, they’ve handed us a crib that will allow us to crack their code.”

“So what is it they’re up to?”

With furrowed brow, Jenny looked away from her monitor and over at Tommy. “Hold your horses, cowboy,” she chided. “How about giving me some elbow room here and a chance to go in and root around some?”

Pulling away, Tommy threw up his hands, palm out. “Okay. Sorry. I was just curious.”

“Don’t feel like the Lone Ranger,” Jenny muttered distractedly even as she was turning her full attention back toward the screen, sporting a fiendish grin as she took to twirling the trackball with an alacrity that even impressed an old hand like Tommy.

With nothing to contribute at the moment and having no wish to interfere with Jenny as she blitzed through screenshot after screenshot of games that had been recorded and saved by Hughes’s people, he eased away from her, leaned back in his chair, and turned his attention into figuring out how he could wean some useful information concerning Susan G. from the girl. That, he concluded, was obviously going to be a greater challenge than cracking the code and tracking down the people they were being paid to nail.

It took Jenny late into the night and most of the next day, but by the time she and Tommy joined Jack Hughes at the Martinique’s own steak house for dinner that evening, she had a firm grasp on what they were dealing with and how the casino’s online game was being used. Over a porterhouse so raw Tommy found he could not help but ask if it was really dead, Jenny laid out her findings, doing so in the same manner she’d been trained to by Susan, who frequently had to remind the girl from Oklahoma that she, Susan, was a dyed-in-the-wool technophobe.

“When you get into the swing of things, it’s all pretty basic,” Jenny pointed out as she sawed off a hunk of red, semi-raw meat Tommy half expected to moo. “The key I used to unlock the system was the names the participants used for their onscreen avatars.” Pausing, she popped a chunk of beef in her mouth and closed her eyes as she savored the taste of fresh, grain-fed beef cooked the way she liked it.

Like Tommy, Hughes couldn’t help but be mesmerized by Jenny’s behavior, which he found to be as appalling as it was alluring in a strange, down-home country way.

“Though the participants in the game regularly changed the names of their screen avatars for each session, they linked the initial session keys to the avatar name sets and then were dumb enough to reuse them.”

“So you know who these people are,” Hughes interjected as Jenny set aside her fork and took up her glass of Coors Light.

With the graceful ease she’d perfected while attending the University of Oklahoma, Jenny was able to shake her head even as she was sipping her beer. “Haven’t a clue,” she blurted as she put down her glass, took up her knife and fork, and went back to sawing away at what was left of the sixteen-ounce hunk of beef in front of her. “I can tell you what they’re up to, though.”

“And that would be…?” Hughes asked, doing his best to keep the exasperation he felt over the tortuous manner with which Jenny was laying things out.

“The people are using the game as a commodities market. The person who opens the game is selling something to the other players.”

Hughes’s exasperation with Jenny’s manner evaporated. “Drugs?”

“That’d be my guess. It’s all rather slick, if you ask me,” she went on without waiting for Hughes to absorb the import of her revelation. “After the seller has managed to bring all the potential buyers to the virtual table, he uses the first game to issue a challenge using a common encryption key. Each buyer is then required to answer using a unique response. By doing so, the seller is able to find out if everyone at the table is legit. If they are, the seller sends a code letting everyone know the game is clean.”

After another break in her narrative in which Jenny took her time to enjoy more of her steak, she explained how the seller went about soliciting bids and, when he was satisfied, arranging for the delivery of the commodity.

“In game two, the seller states both the quantity he has to offer and his price. The other players who are the buyers bid against each other starting in the third game. Those who can’t keep up drop out, just like in a regular poker game. Those who ‘win’ a hand are then provided with the time and location of the delivery using the encryption system Tommy here discovered,” Jenny declared as she waved her steak knife, still slick with blood, in his general direction. “Pretty neat, huh?”

While neither Hughes nor Tommy would have used the word neat to describe how Sean Woodard’s game was being used, both had the same question. After glancing at each other out of the corners of their eyes, they turned their full attention back to Jenny. “Okay, where do we go from here?”

Before answering, she swallowed the last of her steak, set aside her knife and fork, and took a sip of beer, after which she shrugged. “Haven’t a clue. It was my understanding all you wanted us to do was to find out what the little varmints were up to. Unless there’s something else you want, I was planning on heading up to my room and getting changed before heading out to see what kind of trouble I can get into. You gents care to tag along?”

As much as Tommy wanted to say yes, the look he saw in his friend’s eye told him their day was far from over. So he demurred as politely as he could, waiting until Jenny had gathered her things up, thanked Hughes for the dinner, and took off. Turning to Hughes, Tommy sighed. “Well?”

Hughes took a sip of his own beer before answering. “Looks like you and me will be headed back up to see the boss tomorrow morning.”

“What about Jenny?”

Before answering, Hughes glanced over at the entrance of the restaurant where Jenny had disappeared. “Unless you have something you need her for, I think it would be best if we dealt her out of the next hand.”

Though Tommy did have something he wanted to go over with Susan G.’s assistant, it had nothing at all to do with what Hughes was talking about. “Let her have some fun,” he finally muttered. “She earned it.”

“Will she be all right on her own?” Hughes asked, betraying his concern for the girl’s safety.

Unable to help himself, Tommy guffawed. “If you ask me, it’s the people she runs into tonight you need to be concerned about.”

The two men parted with a laugh at the shared thought of the Oklahoma girl raising mayhem. While Hughes settled up the bill before heading up to the casino’s surveillance center to check on things, Tommy made his way out into the night as he, like Jenny, set off to see just what kind of mischief he could get into.

After leaving a message for Jenny the next morning, informing her she was free to do whatever struck her fancy for the day provided she stayed in touch just in case they needed her again, Tommy and Hughes headed out to brief Sean Woodard on what they’d found and find out what he wished to do.

Escorted once more onto the shaded patio by another comely young woman in a white shirtdress, Tommy explained what Jenny had found while enjoying what amounted to his second breakfast of the morning. In doing so, he used terms that were decidedly more technical than the girl from Oklahoma had in order to make what they’d accomplished come across as far more complex than it had been. Hughes, who’d served with Tommy, understood what he was doing. “The last thing you want is for an officer to think he can do something on his own” was a favorite witticism of his he had frequently shared with his fellow NCOs. “It makes them think they don’t need you, leading them to do things they shouldn’t be doing and creating messes that are twice as difficult to sort out than if you’d tackled them on your own in the first place.” So as he had often done while with the colors, Tommy used this opportunity to reinforce the idea his services were indispensable to Sean Woodard.

For his part, Woodard did his best to nod his head from time to time to show he was following what Tommy was saying and ask what he hoped were intelligent questions. Having no desire to spoil his friend’s fun and wishing to drive home the point he really had had the need to call in an outside expert, Hughes said very little. It wasn’t until Tommy had finished that Woodard turned to his surveillance head and asked him what could be done to stop the illicit use of the online poker site.

Having already gone over this in his own mind, Hughes didn’t hesitate to suggest they go to the FBI with what they had and allow them to handle it. “If we were to shut down the site, the criminals would only move on to another gaming site. While it would solve our short-term problems, I expect in time they’d be caught.”

“So?” Woodard muttered dismissively.

“So,” Tommy chipped in, “whoever looked into the matter, whether it be your FBI or ATF or whatever, would, in time, track the miscreants back to you. That would lead them to ask why you hadn’t reported their activities to them right off, causing the investigators to suspect you were in on it.”

Having no wish to open up his business affairs to the close scrutiny of an agency like the FBI, Woodard didn’t need either man to say another word. Instead, he turned his attention back to Hughes, who quickly laid out a course of action he thought would be the fastest way of ridding themselves of the whole mess. “Tommy has suggested that he and his team put together a package that lays out the mechanics of the scheme, providing just enough details of how it works to allow whoever it is that conducts the investigation to delve into the matter without our needing to do any more or to lead them — that is, their techies — back to us. It’ll not only keep them out of our hair but also give them an opportunity to show their bosses just how bloody smart and indispensable they are.”

“I like that,” Woodard muttered as he slowly nodded his head before turning his attention back toward Tommy. “How long will it take for you to pull everything together and hand it off to Jack?”

Easing back in his chair, Tommy made a great show of knitting the pudgy little fingers of his hands together and resting them on his paunch as he took to gazing up as if going over complex calculations in his head. “Oh, two, maybe three days. No more than four,” he added, glancing back down at Woodard.

Cutting his eyes over to Hughes, Woodard regarded him quizzically.

Though he suspected Tommy and the energetic young woman from Oklahoma wouldn’t need more than half a day since they already had most of it pulled together, Hughes nodded.

Satisfied the pair of Welshmen had a firm handle on the issue as well as a solution he could live with, Woodard turned his attention back to Tommy. “In that case, I’ll not keep you gentlemen any longer.”

Appreciating they’d been dismissed, Tommy rose to his feet and took Woodard’s proffered hand. “It’s a pleasure doing business with you.”

“Likewise,” Woodard responded offhandedly as he turned his attention to a fetching young brunette in a white shirtdress who’d come up behind him bearing a stack of documents.

Only after they were in the car and well away from Woodard’s walled estate did Hughes glance over at Tommy out of the corner of his eye. “It’s not going to take you three days to finish up, is it?”

“Do you really want to know?” Tommy asked as he eyed his friend.

Snickering, Hughes shook his head. “No.”

“Good! Now, where are we going to have lunch?”

“You just had breakfast! Two of ’em.”

“So?”

Knowing better than pointing out the obvious and just as eager to spend as much time with an old army buddy swapping war stories, Hughes sighed. “What’ll it be? Chinese, Italian, or Thai?”

“Why not all three?”

Hughes waited until the morning of the third day after their final meeting with Woodard to set up a meeting with the FBI. At Tommy’s request, Hughes went alone with instructions to make no mention of the role either Tommy or Jenny had played in the affair.

“You appreciate I’ve been doing this on the QT,” Tommy explained. “The last thing I need is for some kid in the FBI contacting my boss and asking all sorts of questions he can’t answer.”

“You do appreciate the check you’re going to be paid with is going to be made out to Century Consulting and not you personally,” Hughes pointed out as he was getting ready to head out to the federal building on West Lake Mead Boulevard.

“I know. I might be a crafty little git, but I’m not stupid.”

“Oh, I don’t know about that,” Hughes muttered. “You’re forgetting the time I left you in charge of the Scimitar in Sennelager and came back to find you’d managed to mire it in muck that was up over the road wheels.”

“Can’t blame that one on me, mate. That lieutenant of ours was the one who told me we had to move it.”

“Did he tell you to drive it into a mud puddle?”

“No.”

Hughes grinned. “I rest my case. Now, while you head off and get into trouble, I’ve things I need to take care of.” With that, Hughes left Tommy free to track down Jenny and see what information he could pry out of her concerning Susan G.

As before, this proved to be an exercise in futility. Catching up to her at the same roulette table he’d left her off at the night before, he peppered her with a series of less-than-subtle questions as she watched the play of the wheel, betting before each spin but betting small. Only when he realized what she was up to did he set aside his interest in the redhead she worked for and followed her lead, betting on the same spots she did.

In time, only after she’d gotten a measure of this particular wheel and run the odds in her head did she begin to bet big. And though she lost more than a few times, she was doing well enough to draw the attention of the pit boss, who, accompanied by a pair of uniformed security guards, came up to her and asked her to leave the table.

“I really don’t think you want to bother the girl,” Tommy enjoined as he stepped up next to Jenny and drew himself up. “Not unless you want to take a little trip up the mountain to Sean Woodard’s place and explain why you’re harassing his niece.”

Caught off guard, the pit boss took a moment to look back and forth between Tommy and Jenny, trying to decide if what he was saying was true. He still hadn’t come to a conclusion when one of the security guards’ radios crackled to life. After canting his head off to one side to listen to it, the guard frowned and then eased forward and whispered something in the pit boss’s ear.

In the twinkling of an eye, the demeanor of pit boss changed. “I’m sorry, Mr. Tyler. I wasn’t aware who you or Ms. Garver were.”

“Well, now you know, mate,” Tommy snipped. “Now, if you’ll excuse us, I believe Jack Hughes is expecting us to join him for dinner.”

Stepping aside, the pit boss said nothing as he watched Tommy and Jenny gather up their chips and leave the gaming area.

“Is Jack really waiting for us?” Jenny asked when she was sure they were out of earshot from the pit boss.

“No,” Tommy grunted. “He’s busy keeping an eye out for people like you.”

“Oh,” was all Jenny could say as they headed back to the same steak house where Jenny, using her best Oklahoma drawl, told the waiter to rustle up a fat steer, knock the horns off, pass it over a fire, and serve it up.

As they were waiting for their meals, Tommy went back to peppering Jenny with questions about her boss he thought were innocent sounding. Having grown tired of his ham-handed efforts to pry information out of her, Jenny leaned over the table and glared.

“Look, cowboy, I expect you already know just about all there is to know about Susan, so save your breath, ’cos you’re not going to get anything more out of me.”

The young woman’s tone of voice and an expression that would have caused a lesser man to quiver were enough to cause Tommy to cease and desist. Besides, he concluded, she was right. Other than finding out if Susan G. and Andy had ever been romantically involved, something he expected even the grand inquisitor of Spain would have been unable to discover, he did know all he needed to about Jenny’s boss.

With that issue behind them, the two settled into enjoying a companionable meal together before signing the check over to their hotel account and heading off into the cool, desert night in search of a new venue where each of them could apply their own unique skills and talents to beat the house.

According to a recent New York Times news article (9 December 2013), the NSA and British intelligence were monitoring World of Warcraft and other online games in an effort to see if they were being used by terrorists to communicate with each other. The piece was published after we had started this story, and Jenny came up with the idea for this plot. Given that this is the second story line she suggested involving poker, I’ve come to the conclusion it would be unwise to play cards with her, at least when there was money on the line.

The ability of the NSA to monitor all forms of electronic communications has caused those engaging in criminal activities or waging war on the United States, the UK, and anyone who does not agree with them to explore new and ingenious methods of passing important operational information back and forth between themselves. Whether anyone has ever used this technique is a good question. Is it possible? Sure. Would it work? Probably. Is it something our cyberguardians need to keep an eye open for? I think so. I just hope they — the NSA and others — use their discretion when doing so.

HAROLD COYLE

The fact that criminals, malefactors, and others go to great lengths to both encrypt and hide their communications is as old as human civilization. Mary, Queen of Scots, whilst imprisoned at Chartley during the Babington Plot, used a substitution cipher to communicate with her supporters, hiding the messages in the bungs of outgoing empty beer barrels. Disastrously for Mary, Elizabeth I’s spymaster, Sir Francis Walsingham, had already compromised both her secret communications channel and the cipher.

Most security-aware people are nowadays familiar with the concept of public key or asymmetric cryptography, however symmetric cryptographic techniques (in which both sender and recipient share a common key) are still very much alive and well.

For those who are interested in the basis for the WWII Japanese JN-25 code used in the story and also some of the tools used to defeat it, I would recommend visiting the Bletchley Park website, the WWII home of British code-breaking efforts.

Jenny used a series of open-source tools to help her first identify the criminals’ behavior patterns and then break the code. There are a wide variety of tools available for anyone interested, but for the story, we were particularly impressed by both the OpenPR project for pattern recognition and CrypTool. Her job was made significantly easier by the criminals themselves when they made the fundamental mistake of reusing their encryption key. This sort of clue or “crib” is something cryptanalysts pray for and gives cryptographers nightmares.

JENNIFER ELLIS