Authors: James Swain
“Be my guest.”
The elders began to talk amongst themselves. Not knowing their names, Wolfe had learned to differentiate them by their accents. The elder on the left had attended either Oxford or Cambridge, and spoke like an aristocrat; the middle elder had worked in broadcasting and had what was commonly called a BBC accent; while the elder on the right was a commoner, and spoke with a Cockney bite. Finished, the elders resumed looking at him through the Web cam.
“What about the other names on your list?” the middle elder asked.
“I took out Madame Marie last night,” Wolfe replied. “Afraid there was some collateral damage. Her husband attacked me. No choice but to blow him away.”
“And the others?”
“I had a go at Lester Rowe this morning. That’s when I ran into Warlock.”
“Did you dispose of Rowe?”
“Afraid not.”
“Do you mean to say you’ve only eliminated one psychic so far?”
“That’s right.”
“You’ve been in New York three days. This is taking too long.”
“Have I ever let you down?”
“Not yet, Major. But there’s always a first time.”
“I’ll get them all. You have my word.”
“Even Peter Warlock?”
“I’ll run a bloody bus over him if I have to.”
“Glad to hear it. Give us a timetable for your mission’s completion.”
“I’ll be done in forty-eight hours,” Wolfe replied.
“No sooner?”
“What do you have in mind?”
“How about thirty-six hours?”
Wolfe didn’t like this. Killing people by committee never worked. He made his own decisions, which was why he’d lasted as long in his profession as he had.
“I could, but it would mean a lot more collateral damage.”
“Squeamish?” the elder on the left asked.
“If you want a butcher, go to the meat market.”
“Is that an attempt at sarcasm, Major?”
“Take it any way you please.”
The elders fell silent, clearly displeased.
“Is forty-eight hours the best you can do?” the middle elder asked, breaking the silence.
“Yes, it is,” Wolfe said.
“Very well.”
A breeze passed through the Room of Spirits, causing the elders’ robes to flutter. The circular table began to rotate, and the strange signs etched on the glass glowed like night flies. The elders studied the signs while mumbling to themselves. Finally the table stopped spinning, and the signs lost their glow.
The middle elder addressed Wolfe. “We have reached a decision. It is imperative that you finish your mission. Find the remaining psychics on your list, and do away with them. A forty-eight-hour window is not preferable, but is acceptable. Once you are done, get out of there as fast as possible. Is this understood?”
“Understood.” Wolfe’s finger touched the mouse on his laptop.
“I’m not finished. We are bothered by your lack of resolve, and your defiant attitude. You were recruited into the Order because you’re a soldier, and soldiers do not run in the heat of battle, or question their superiors. Your mettle needs to be tested.”
“There’s nothing wrong with my bloody mettle,” Wolfe snapped.
“We feel otherwise.”
A hissing sound came out of the laptop. Behind where the elders sat, an aquarium wall had lowered, and a giant Burmese python spilled out, and slithered across the floor. Wolfe had encountered a Burmese python while in the army, and knew it was lethal. Jumping into the air, the python burst through the laptop’s screen, courtesy of the elders’ dark magic.
The python landed in his lap. Wolfe grabbed the snake before it could wrap its body around his throat. It was six feet long, and incredibly powerful. Falling onto the floor, he wrestled with the beast, knocking down furniture and causing all sorts of noise. Finally he got the python’s head between his powerful hands, and squeezed until it went limp.
The laptop had fallen on the floor. Its screen was facing him, and he saw the elders nod their approval.
“Good-bye, Major Wolfe,” the middle elder said. “Stay in touch.”
The picture became a pinprick, then disappeared. Wolfe stared at his hands. The python had vanished. In its place was one of his shoes, which had been lying on the floor.
“Bloody arseholes,” he said.
18
Liza was furious. Peter had been gone for hours, and hadn’t responded to her calls or texts. She knew that her boyfriend had mood swings, and often took long walks to clear his head. There was nothing wrong with that, but it wasn’t right that he didn’t stay in touch, especially after the attack at the theater last night.
Fuming, she sat at the kitchen table. Peter was a psychic, and he was also a flake. He hardly seemed to care about her feelings, or what she thought about their relationship. There were times when she wondered if he’d been raised by wolves.
A pad of paper sat on the table. On it she’d written the words
Order of Astrum
. The man who’d attacked Peter was a member of the Order, and she’d overheard Peter and Detective Schoch talking about them on the stoop. They were the key to the puzzle.
She pulled out her BlackBerry to try and learn more. To her surprise, her Google search turned up nothing but a vague reference on Wikipedia. She decided to call in reinforcements, and dialed Snoop.
“Hey, it’s me,” she said. “You at home?”
“I’m sitting at the bar at the Waverly Inn watching the beautiful ladies,” Snoop replied.
“I have a favor to ask. Can you meet me at Peter’s place?”
“I’m game. The girl I was hitting on just blew me off.”
“Her loss. Do you still have that hot laptop you told me about?”
“Hot isn’t the word. It’s steaming.”
“It can’t be traced back to you, can it?”
“Not in a hundred years. What have you got in mind?”
Liza stared at the pad. If the Order of Astrum was sending assassins out to kill people, then some government agency had to know about them.
“I want you to hack a government mainframe,” she replied.
“Yipes. Which one?”
She had to think. Secret Service? No. CIA? Not them, either.
“FBI,” she said.
“Now you’re talking. I’ll grab the laptop from my apartment.”
“Thanks, Snoop. I owe you big time.”
Liza ended the call. She assumed that breaking into the FBI’s computer was a federal offense, punishable by jail time, waterboarding, and who knew what else, yet she had no qualms about doing it. Peter was in danger, and she was going to find out why.
She fixed a pot of coffee while waiting for Snoop. When it came to hacking, Snoop had few peers. At fourteen, he’d gotten caught downloading a hundred thousand music files off the Internet, which he’d distributed to his entire high school class. At sixteen, he’d been tagged for breaking into a dozen Fortune 500 companies. At nineteen, he’d hit for the cycle, and been arrested for hacking three government servers deemed impenetrable. When a judge had asked him why he’d done it, Snoop had replied, “Because they’re there, Your Honor.” Snoop had never hidden his past. If anything, he was proud of his accomplishments, and boasted that there wasn’t a computer in the world whose defenses he couldn’t penetrate. Liza hoped he was right, because it was the only way she was going to find out what was going on.
The front buzzer rang. She bounded down the hall and opened the door.
“That was fast.”
Snoop entered with a shoulder bag draped over his shoulder. His hair hung in his face like a shaggy dog’s, and his purple sneakers were untied. They walked down the hall to the kitchen. Taking a Dell Latitude laptop from the bag, he placed it on the table.
“So who’s our target?” he asked.
“I told you—I want you to hack the FBI.”
“I thought you were kidding.”
“Afraid not. Is that a problem?”
Snoop picked up the coffee mug Liza had set for him, and sipped the steaming brew. “Depends on what your definition of problem is. Is spending ten years of your life making license plates inside a federal prison a problem?”
“You can back out if you want to.”
“Me? Back out? Never. But we need to take precautions. The FBI doesn’t screw around. Once they realize we’ve hacked their computer, they’ll come after us.”
“I thought a hot laptop couldn’t be traced.”
“It can’t be traced to me, but it still can be located. The FBI has developed a special tracing system which allows them to lay an invisible thread into a hacker’s computer,” Snoop explained. “That thread lets them pinpoint a hacker’s location anywhere in the world. I found out the hard way when I was in college. I wanted to find out what the FBI knew about Roswell, so I hacked their computer. Ten minutes after I’d signed off, an SUV with tinted windows pulled up to my dorm, and four guys in black suits came and arrested me.”
“The men in black ran you down? Come on, be serious.”
“I am being serious.”
Liza drank her coffee. Snoop looked nervous. That was hardly like him.
“Look, I don’t want you to get in trouble because of me,” she said. “Just show me how to get into the FBI’s mainframe, and I’ll take care of this myself.”
“That could take years. I’ll get us in, but on my terms. Deal?”
“Deal.”
Snoop drained his cup and returned the laptop to his shoulder bag. “There’s a sports bar on Second Avenue called Ball Four that has Wi-Fi and roasted peanuts. We’ll go there.”
“Why not use the Internet here? It’s secure.”
“Nothing’s secure on the Internet. Besides, I like peanuts.”
He left the kitchen before Liza could reply. A moment later, the front door banged open. She got the hint, and hurried to catch up.
* * *
Ball Four had all the charm of a college frat house. Liza got two Cokes and a bowl of roasted peanuts from the bar, and brought them to the corner booth where Snoop sat typing. His boyish features were a study in concentration, his fingers a blur.
“Someday, you’re going to have to explain how you hack a computer,” she said.
“Hacking isn’t as hard as you think,” he said. “Most passwords use lowercase letters, and the numbers zero through nine, or thirty-six total characters. A five-character password has a total of sixty million possibilities. I can run a sixty-million simulation on my software program in five minutes.”
“It can’t really be that simple.”
“It just takes practice.”
He fell silent, and continued to work his magic on the laptop.
“Okay, I’ve broken through the FBI’s firewall and bypassed the security system,” he said. “With one click, I’ll be inside the mainframe. Now, what are we looking for?”
“The Order of Astrum.”
“Didn’t the guy who attacked Peter belong to that group?”
“Yup. I need to find out who they are.”
“Does Peter know about this? You know how he gets when we do things and don’t tell him.”
Liza thought back to Peter’s shocking revelation of this morning. It had felt like a betrayal, and she had to know what else her boyfriend was hiding.
“Do it anyway,” she said.
“Whatever you say. Once I log in, you’ve got ten minutes to find what you’re looking for. Then we get out of here. Agreed?”
“Agreed.”
Snoop clicked his mouse. “Okay, we’re in the FBI’s system. Nice home page. I’m typing the Order of Astrum into the search engine. You hit pay dirt. They’ve got a file on them.” He spun the laptop around, and slid it across the table. “The clock’s running. Go!”
Liza started reading. Her skin was tingling, and she felt like Alice jumping down the rabbit hole. The first paragraph practically knocked her sideways.
“Holy cow,” she said. “It says the Order of Astrum has been linked to several ruthless dictators who are enemies of the United States, and they are considered a threat to national security.”
“You were expecting the Boy Scouts of America?”
She tossed a peanut at Snoop, and continued reading.
“This is amazing,” Liza said a few minutes later. “According to this, the Order of Astrum wasn’t always bad. There are five members, four boys and one girl. In 1942, when they were little kids, they used their psychic powers to help the British fight the Nazis. It says a group of American generals asked for a meeting, and were taken to a town called Marble in southern England. The children conducted a séance, and made furniture move around the room. When the séance was finished, the children told the generals which towns the Germans were stationed in. It says this information was used to plot the Normandy invasion.”
“Sounds like there’s a movie here,” Snoop said.
Another peanut hit Snoop in the face.
“Better hurry. You’ve only got a couple of minutes left,” he cautioned.
“Afraid of the men in black running you down again?”
“You think I’m kidding? Just wait.”
Liza went back to reading the file.
“Oh, my God,” she said. “It says that the Order of Astrum went silent after the war. In 1988, the FBI’s New York field office was contacted by a British couple who claimed to be members of the Order, who had fled England with their son to escape the other members. The couple’s names were Claire and Henry Warren.”
“So?” Snoop said.
“Those were Peter’s parents.”
“What? Are you sure?”
“Positive. Peter showed me their pictures.”
“Let me see that.”
Liza slid the laptop across the table. Snoop found the spot, and read aloud.
“‘The Warrens claimed the other three members of the Order were selling their services to the highest bidder, and were in league with the Devil. When the Warrens were asked to rejoin the group, they refused, and were threatened by the other members.’
“The FBI protected the Warrens for six months. Right after the protection was lifted, the couple were abducted and murdered after attending a show in New York. The FBI believes the Order was behind the killings.”
Snoop looked up from the laptop. “Wow. Do you think Peter knows any of this?”
Liza shook her head. Peter had confided in her that he knew little about his parents. Now, she thought she understood why.
“Who’s going to tell him?” Snoop asked.