Authors: The Sacred Cut
"You
bet," she said with a smile. "Now would you boys like to borrow
that report for a little while? Maybe you can give Leo some ideas."
"Yes,"
Gianni Peroni replied, and began walking towards Leo Falcone and Joel Leapman
with a look of pure fury on his face.
THERE
WAS TOO LITTLE TIME and too much information. It was like being lost in a
forest of unreadable signs and signals. She'd typed in the name Nic had
mentioned, "Henry Anderton," and got a brief uninformative report
on the attack that had triggered the alert over security for American visitors.
It seemed routine, unconnected to the present case. The dead man was simply an
academic who'd been the victim of unprovoked street violence in a small
square in the ghetto, the Piazza Mattei. The name rang a bell. It had a
tortoise fountain in the centre. Her father had shown it to her a couple of
times, taken her picture standing beside it on one of their many walks around
Rome. However, nothing connected that assault with the current investigation.
The victim had been badly beaten. According to the records, he'd been
flown back to America by his health insurer and hospitalized in Boston. A short
search on the Internet proved that Costa's suspicions were unfounded. Henry
Anderton was a famous professor, now retired. There was only one item of minor
interest in what she could glean of his background from the Net. One academic
paper he'd published, on the structure and funding of Islamic terrorist
groups, acknowledged the assistance of several FBI officers in the provision of
advice and information. It was a tenuous link, but hardly earth-shattering.
Then
she tried "Bill Kaspar" and got nothing, not a damn thing, which
was surely odd. Grateful as she was for Fielding's covert help, she
understood it had its limitations. Fielding hadn't taken her into the
very heart of the FBI's internal network, its mother lode of precious
intelligence, brought up to date each minute of every day, collated from around
the world by systems that never went anywhere close to a piece of public cable.
She guessed he'd set some parameters himself, a cutoff date of some
fifteen years earlier, judging by the dates on the material her searches found.
Other parameters had been set for him. There was another raft of security
clearances still above her that brought down the shutters the moment she went
near them. That made sense. Fielding was senior, but he was only an embassy
official working in the field. There were many doors he couldn't open.
Yet
there was a mine of precious intelligence here, if only she could find the
right way to track down what she wanted. That required hitting the correct
keywords--the terms that would take her straight to the relevant material.
Without them, it was impossible to hope to read more than a fraction of what
lay on the network. Instead, she had to prioritize. And if she did find
anything, there was the problem, too, of what to do with it. Ordinarily she
could have marked the documents she wanted and set them up as a set of
reference points for future retrieval. Ordinarily, however, she wouldn't
be using a phoney identity to hack the Bureau's database in a way that
doubtless broke the terms of her contract and probably put her in jeopardy of
criminal action to boot.
It
was impossible to print a thing without leaving a record. She couldn't
e-mail material out of the system either. There were bars in place to prevent
that. She couldn't even cut and paste items into another document and get
them out that way, or, because the hardware prevented it, copy a thing to a
floppy or pen drive. It was simply too dangerous to take notes, written or
dictated. All she could hope to do was track down some key documents and, as
best she could, memorize as much of the broad content as possible. Or...
take a bigger risk.
"Find
something first," she reminded herself, and typed another phrase.
Babylon Sisters
.
Thornton
had surely given her the password for a reason. The words meant something too. It
was another memory from her childhood, more voices from the airy, bright
apartment on the Aventine hill. Of some old rock number getting played over and
over again by a band her father and his friends all adored.
The
band was Steely Dan. "Babylon Sisters" was the long, jazzy number
he loved so much that someone--but who?--had called him "Steely
Dan Deacon" once and it stuck.
With
good reason too. It wasn't just that, back in Rome before the sourness
and the divorce consumed him, Dan Deacon loved that kind of music: cool,
jazz-tinged rock, stuff Emily could never quite pin down, with weird, only
half-comprehensible lyrics. It was because he was a tough guy too. The last few
years he'd been alive he was so damn tough she scarcely dared go near
him.
She
glanced at her watch--just fifteen minutes left on the system and nothing
to show so far--and cursed herself, racked her brain for more of the
numbers he and his buddies loved, listening to them over and over on the Bose
hi-fi in the living room. They still sat in her head, dim stains on her
consciousness from a time when music, for her, meant weekly piano lessons
struggling with Hindemith under the sour gaze of a stuck-up old woman smelling
of lavender in an apartment in the neighbouring block.
Such
a contrast to the rolling, unpredictable keyboards, stabs of lyrical guitar and
the weird, weird lyrics her dad loved.
"Babylon
Sisters" most of all, with the throwaway line that came straight after
the title, sung so rapidly you had to strain to catch the phrase.
Shake it
.
She
could picture her dad--Steely Dan Deacon--just a touch drunk with a
couple of guys from work, singing along to the track, dancing, half swaying the
way men did in that condition, yelling those words out loud.
"You
are so goddamn awful at this job, Emily Deacon," she whispered to
herself. "Any moment now Joel Leapman is going to walk in, see what
you're doing and put you on the first plane home."
And
then she would never find out what had happened, never get to the bottom of the
sacred cut.
The
network had one of those freeform text-searching systems, a kind of internal
SuperGoogle reserved for spooks. You could throw any number of different terms
at it--"purple Transylvanian banana fetish igloo"--and it
would trawl all the zillions of words it kept in its maw, try and put two and
two together to make four, then shoot a few answers straight back at you within
seconds.
It
was clever for a machine, which meant it had the combined IQ of a million
worker ants if you were lucky enough to hit the right buttons.
She
typed in "Bill Kaspar Dan Deacon Iraq."
The
same old stuff as before shot up on the screen--page upon page of
documents, no particular order, no particular sense. Days of work. Weeks maybe.
She
looked at her watch again. The minutes were flying by now. Soon the shutters
would come down for good. Thornton Fielding was risking a lot here. His career.
Maybe more. She owed it to him to get better at this.
"Sacred
Cut Bill Kaspar Iraq."
It
just got worse. There was all manner of crap creeping in now and she knew why. "Sacred
cut" meant nothing to the system.
Wherever
that came from happened
after
.
"Think
of the song, stupid," she muttered. "Think of Bill Kaspar. Think of
what Thornton was trying to tell you."
The
user name wasn't BillK. It was WillFK.
Some
people liked to shorten their names in conversation and keep it formal on
paper. Some people had middle names. The FBI was an institution. The higher up
the ladder you got, the more likely you were to gain a few affectations along
the way.
She
typed in "William F. Kaspar Steely Dan Deacon" and said a little
prayer to whatever silicon god lived behind that screen, asking it to cut her a
little slack, serve up a soupcon of mercy for a change, pick the right
team of worker ants for this problem because, in all truth, she desperately
needed them right now.
The
system chugged. A document came up with a date from 1990. Then the message:
Access
denied
.
"Shit,"
she muttered and watched it chug through six other files blocked by the same
rule. "Shit, shit, shit..."
The
network was running with all the speed of an octogenarian athlete. It was
hopeless. It was dumb. It was typical of her career in the FBI.
Then
Emily Deacon, more out of desperation than anything, typed in "William F.
Kaspar Steely Dan Babylon Sisters Shake It," sat back and wondered what
she'd do next. Go see the good-looking Italian cop at his gorgeous
farmhouse out there in the snowy wilds, open her hands and say, "Got
nothing. How about some wine? Why don't we forget about everything for a
while and just talk because I like talking to you."
Nic
Costa hadn't even come close to making a pass. It was odd. It was so
un-Italian because she had a feeling he'd like to, really.
"Ask
me, Nic, because I'm going crazy staring at this stupid computer,"
she whispered.
Somewhere--in
Miami or Washington, Seattle or on a server just down the hall--a hard
drive flipped into life and popped a single, unrestricted document on the
screen.
It
was just a memo. A
scanned
memo too, not a whole chunk of real,
readable text, which may have been why it slipped through the security cracks. She
checked the keywords some dumb underling had assigned to it. Just two:
"Shake It."
Ha, ha
.
She
was breathless. She felt stupidly alive. This was the only chance. Take it or
leave it, because this never comes again.
So...
Emily
Deacon cast a quick look at the door, saw no one beyond it, then took the tiny
digital camera out of her purse, the one she kept for road accidents and shots
of buildings, sights that interested her out of the blue. Then, trying not to
tremble, she snapped the screen, and the next one, and the one after that.
From: William F. Kaspar
To: Steely Dan B. et al
Date: 1991, near as dammit
Subject: Babylon Sisters
Status: you have to ask?
Let it be known that I, William F. Kaspar, the Lizard King, the Holy
Owl, Grand Master of the Universe, etcetera, etcetera, shall be attending the
court of the Scarlet Beast presently, accompanied by my royal harem, and I
demand--DEMAND--fealty from you lazy, good-for-nothing, pasta-sucking
ingrates
.
There is a purpose, acolytes. A great one: mayhem
.
The Scarlet Beast has charged us with creating mayhem. We possess a
God-given duty to deliver and it is a mighty relief to old Bill K this faceless
bastard has volunteered you already. Though I cannot help but wonder, dear
friend, whether you didn't understand that all along. NTK, huh
?
I read the cast list. A few men I know. A few are new but I guess
we're gonna love "em all the same. Plus I'm bringing a couple
of ladies of my own too, since we live in emancipated days and they can do
things with radios and computers and stuff that beats the living shit out of
me. Though I cannot help but wonder, dear friend, whether you didn't know
that all along. NTK, huh
?
Practicalities.
1. The Scarlet Beast is a generous Beast, though I guess you know that
already! Those figures you sent me are enough to keep us going for six months
in the desert if some spine-deficient pen-pusher in the Pentagon starts to get
cold feet and wonders whether we shouldn't just pick up the phone, call
Saddam and say: please, pretty please, mister, just pack up your tanks and your
soldiers and walk all the way home to Baghdad
.
2. We got immunity. Hell, we got more immunity than a Klansman in
Alabama. We can do what we like, when we like, and no one's ever going to
care. (Am I telling you something you don't know here or what, boy?)
3. We got deep cover. We're the Babylon Sisters, buddy. And no one
knows our name. This is a cash-only, love-"em-and-leave-'em
operation entirely in the hands of a bunch of ghosts. So don't expect no
medals. Knowing what little I do of our anonymous master don't expect no
thanks either. Duty is its own reward
.
4. This Scarlet Beast guy may not have told you yet but you got extra
work to do. I looked at your record, brother. Hell, Danboy! You ain't
fired a weapon in anger since Nicaragua! What happened to old Steely? I am the
military guy here, so listen to me when I say this. When we hit the sand there
we start running. This thing happens on army time. Two hours' sleep a day
if we're lucky and more work, more action, in between than you've
ever seen in your little life. We're pre-empting stuff here, laying down
the groundwork for what comes after. And that means the shit happens
constantly, sometimes when old Bill here won't expect it to. I
don't have room for passengers. So tell me this: are you going soft now
you got that lovely little rugrat running round your feet? If that's the
case let me illuminate you a little. FORGET THE LITTLE CRITTER TILL THIS IS
DONE. Kids are great, Dan. When I came visiting and bounced that little darling
up and down on my knee last spring I thought you were the luckiest SOB on the
planet. But you know something? You're not. You just got a whole load of
new responsibilities to add to the old ones
.