Waylon's visits with his daughter were also perfunctory affairs. He came by her college a few times to see her and always gave her some cash, even when she insisted it wasn't necessary. He missed her graduation from medical school, but was around a few times when she was doing her residency in Houston and once later when she got a job at a Dallas hospital.

  All they knew about his death was that it was an accident and that there could be no viewing before the funeral services.

  Neither surviving Griggs felt much like dessert, so Granddad drove his granddaughter out to the municipal airport early and saw her off back home. He swore to come visit and she did the same. But they each knew that their only tie to one another was gone. The one mysterious, unknowable person in the world that provided them a link to one another's lives was no more.

  * * * * *

  On the other side of the world, Blair Freeman presented the facts of Waylon Griggs' passing to the team.

  "He died instantly," Blair paraphrased from an informal report on the screen of his tablet. The six men of the team sat around the table in a ward room aboard the Carl Vinson and listened without expression. "He was coordinating the pick-up of a male suspect who had been in recent close contact with Young-El and the network over the 'net. There was also an agent of Young-El on scene. The pair was planning on detonating a car bomb at a July 4th celebration in Grommet Island Park."

  "That's near Dam Neck," Chili said.

  "Lot of guys from our base would be there," Heath said.

  "Well, it was set off by the female suspect--a foreign national--behind the motel they were holed up in," Blair said. "She used a detonator rigged to a cell phone. Griggs was caught in the blast. Never knew what hit him. Three feds died and two more severely injured, along with the female suspect."

  "You said she was a foreign national?" Manny asked.

  "Yeah. Armenian. We can link her to the shooting in Oceanside too," Blair said. "She's one of the physical contacts between Young-El and homegrown zanies. She's certainly not the only one. There was a female of a different description in Seattle and another in St. Louis and Baltimore. All young women. Young-El's got some kind of fucked up dating service for sociopathic loners going on. This one's in a coma, and being held and treated at Walter Reade. I don't know if we'll ever get more from her."

  "They hit near Pendleton and now Little Creek," Heath said. "They're concentrating on military personnel now."

  "And their families," Flame added.

  "We all knew reprisals would be a possibility after you guys whacked UBL," Blair said. "This Young-El organization is able to move quicker. His plots are less ambitious but he can move fast and dirty. His body counts are smaller but he can make up for that with a running total and it looks like he plans to do just that. The agency has no real grip on how many lone wolves there are out there right now getting all fucked up on Allah."

  "So when do we shove off to whack this asshole?" Chili asked.

  "We need a thread to pull on," Blair said. "One thread and we can unravel the network."

  CHAPTER 21

  NANOTEL CORPORATE HEADQUARTERS PORTLAND, OREGON

  Anyone who went to high school with Angus Fleming would have told you he was a hopeless geek with no friends, no personality, and zero chance of ever moving out of his parents' house in suburban Des Moines.

  And Angus thought of that each morning, as he pulled his candy apple red Viper into his reserved executive parking spot at the AI research facility on the sprawling Nanotel campus, and made his way to his 1000-square-foot office complex in the basement. Here, just six years after graduating from John L. Lewis High, he was known as The Wizard--with a 1.5 mil salary, and a butt-load of bennies and stock options. Almost everything about him that made him a loner among his classmates also made him the closest thing to a god, in his billion dollar techno-lair that was considered state-of-the-science across the world of computer geekdom.

  He was a valued employee, innovator, and something of a seer; practically a legend. But many of his accomplishments were deep, dark secrets in both corporate and national security circles. Nanotel, like many other software and service providers, cooperated with law enforcement and intelligence agencies in Washington. It was for their mutual benefit. The private sector companies did what they could to help out the Pentagon and Langley in the their daily cyber-battle with foreign nations (both hostile and friendly) who hacked, infected, and generally screwed with systems vital to American interests thousands of times a day. The feds, in return, helped Nanotel and companies like them hunt down nests of cyber-criminals who did harm to the computer giants and their business partners.

  This placed Nanotel at risk and made them a target of cyber jihadists as well.

  Angus was the acknowledged master of zeroing in on jungle compounds in far away lands; finding wired-up boiler rooms selling phony timeshares and kiddie porn and making pleas for Nigerian princes in a financial bind. Villages that looked just like they did a thousand years ago could conceal computer work stations with satellite access and sophisticated email cons that netted their senders tens of millions of dollars a year from suckers around the world. If you got online looking to do evil using any of Nanotel's software or affiliated service providers, Angus would find you and bring his wrath down on you. He still looked like the skinny asthmatic kid who was such a lure for bullies back at John L. Lewis but, in his own world, he was Green Lantern and Doctor Strange rolled together, with a near-mystic ability to uncover rats wherever they crept in the wainscoting of the world wide web.

  He gave a wave to the security camera as he crossed the almost empty lot. It was past two in the morning on a weekend and all but the die-hards were home. Nanotel was flex-scheduled to the max and Angus came and went as he wished. He often arrived in the dead of night and might stay for as long as 72 straight hours, working his magic, fueled only by energy drinks and frozen pizza.

  Dylan Parmienter was the only one in the lair when Angus came in. Parmienter was a drone. An unimaginative plodder whose greatest value was his dogged and tireless scouring through code in quest of whatever bit, byte, glitch, or tell he was sent to find. He was one of six drones with varying levels of talent who worked as thralls to the Wizard, and performed the hours and hours of menial spadework necessary to unlocking the secrets behind encrypted files, root-kits, and password algorithms.

  "What's the good word, Parm?" Angus asked as he stooped to yank a Red Bull from the mini fridge by his work station. He settled into his custom leather command chair with Bluetooth touch controls set in the arms. His units powered up as soon as they sensed his presence and a half-circle of six monitors around his black oak tabletop desk popped on. Each screen formed a contiguous screensaver mural of a cute anime warrior chick using a sword to chop through slimy animated tentacles threatening to violate her honor from every direction.

  "These flash drives contain mostly text files, Wiz," Dylan said, without taking his eyes from the multiple monitors before him. "Word and WP. French and English. The user is a PC. No real clues or tells. Most date-stamped within the past thirty days. They're addressed to--"

  "No, no, no," Angus said and waved his hand before him. "I don't care about content, Parm. We're looking for anomalies. Things that don't belong. The kitten in the wolf pack. The pretzel in the Doritos bag. The doo-doo in the wading pool."

  These drives were taken as evidence in a recent raid that netted a pair of terror suspects in Virginia; nothing that had hit the media for public consumption. This was all still hush-hush stuff. The drives were loaded with raw data and enough evidence to send the recipients to Supermax. But what the agency wanted was a clue to their source. These drives were the middle-tech part of a low-tech network of couriers who carried them far away from the source, to hand-deliver them or plug them into cut-out systems and send data on. There were one or two--or even more--steps between these drives and the geographic location of the jihad-joes who created them. Super cyber-spooks in the CIA and NSA had combed over the drives and come up with nada. The Wizard was volunteered by his bosses in corporate security to dissect the mini-drives. It was another chance for the Wizard to dazzle the peasants with his prodigious powers.

  "Way ahead of you, Wiz. The flash drives aren't virgin," Dylan said, and stroked the surface of his main monitor. "They were used before."

  On Dylan's monitor an image appeared: a color-coded graphic of a flash drive sliced horizontally, and segmented in layers. Each layer represented content that had been stored on the drive; both the current content, and older files that had been burned onto the drive, and then erased or burned over. The Wizard pulled the same graphic up on his own monitor. Each file left fingerprints and whispers behind, even if it was scrubbed or written over.

  "So, what's the analysis, Parm?"

  "I've retrieved a lot of the erased files. Enough to read their full content in some cases. Partials in others. Enough to identify the programs used and dates they were burned."

  "Are they all text? Any image files? Maps?"

  "Mostly text, Wiz. But there're some music downloads on a few. And one had a movie on it."

  "Which one?"

  "The one designated YEN-003," Dylan said.

  Angus sat bolt upright. He worked his mouse to scroll through the analysis, until he got to the expanded image of YEN-003. He tapped and made the graphic larger.

  "What's the movie?"

  "The file reads inseedangiii.flx.docx.rar," Angus said from his station. "I don't know the movie's name. It looks like Thai."

  "Insee Dang 3," Angus said. His deep knowledge of cult films and foreign action movie trends was scary. "Red Eagle 3. It's a martial arts/superhero fusion flick that's currently in release in Thai and Burmese and subtitled in Vietnamese. This has to be a pirate copy."

  "That helps us?" Dylan hesitantly asked. Angus was enthusiastic but was often hard to read. Was it Red Bull jitters or were they really on to something? What did a terrorist's taste in movies mean in the grand scheme?

  "Big time, Parm," Angus said and began opening multiple links. "You get any sleep recently?"

  "Depends on what day it is."

  "Friday. No, Saturday."

  "Yeah," Dylan said and stood up, suddenly weary. "I better crash."

  "You earned it, Padawan," Angus said, his attention fixed on the layers of windows opening before him. "We may just have this by the ass."

  "Wonderful," Dylan said and shuffled away to sleep for eighteen straight on a futon in a soundproofed quiet room down the hall from the lair.

  * * * * *

  It was Monday morning before the Wizard was able to draw a history of just when Red Eagle 3 had been pirated and offered for download. Within the window time-stamped on the file, only one illegal torrent site had the movie presented in HD and widescreen without sub-titles. Other sites offered the movie, but only one matched the version on the flash drive. The RAR file on the suspect drive was downloaded and copied to the drive during that time. The site was an outfit called FlopFlip.net.

  Angus smiled to himself when he tracked backwards to find FlopFlip's homebase. He placed a call on a secure line to the operative within the Agency who was the full-time liaison to Nanotel.

  "Bethany? It's the Wizard." Angus said. He never met Bethany DeSantos and hoped he never would, as his imagination had created an avatar for her that no mere mortal woman of flesh and blood could hope to live up to.

  "Do you have something on the Young-El drives?" Her voice was always chipper. More like the ubiquitous female voice on a recorded information tree on an airline's reservation line than a spy.

  "I only found a torrent he downloaded. And I say 'only' to emphasize how awesome this find is." Angus often explained his attempts at irony.

  "Okay," she said without a trace of impatience. "And how does this help us?"

  "This file was only available from one site at the time he downloaded it. I checked the site and in thirty days the same file has been downloaded just under three thousand times. In the window in which Young-El downloaded it was probably less than five hundred."

  "That's a lot to sift through. Do you have some good news for me? Some better news anyway?"

  "It's a subscription-only site," Angus said. "The site will have records of who downloaded and from where. It's a pirate outfit called FlopFlip."

  "And where do we find them?" she asked. He could hear her fingers flying over a keyboard in background, and a series of clicks and a change in the ambient noise told him that others had jumped on the line.

  "You guys are gonna love this," Angus said and rocked back in his command chair with a grin.

  CHAPTER 22

  NAVE SHA'ANAN, TEL AVIV, ISRAEL

  Yamam, a special unit of Israel's national police force, made entry at three in the morning to find a full crew of twelve operating a growing concern in a converted garage building off Yehuda Halevi Street. Rows of hard drives and modems and multiple trunk lines of cables, Wi-Fi, and satellite connections. The police had orders from the top to move fast and bring whomever they found in for questioning, strictly on charges of piracy and theft of intellectual property. Get them, cuff them, and hustle them out.

  Separate units were striking homes all over the city--and one in Haifa--to round up all of the gang and bring them in for booking and arraignment. A total sweep. No mention of national security or terror. Israel was never terribly ardent about cracking down on copyright infringement so these video pirates were taken entirely by surprise.

  They were mostly Israelis. But there was an Albanian and four Russians in the bunch. They were Mafiya, but middle management. The sweep netted a couple of handguns. That would give the detectives some leverage, as well as cause to hold the whole lot of them for a few days. And that was the whole point of the exercise, separate these hoods from their gear.

  Once the garage site was clear of suspects and the neighborhood had settled back to sleep after the noisy raid, agents of Mossad arrived to pull hard drives and carefully catalogue and crate them for shipment. The crates were driven to a secure hangar at Ben Gurion International, where a Gulfstream 5 sat warmed up and cleared for take-off. The G-5 was co-owned by a syndicate of trial lawyers who all just happened to live in Alexandria, Virginia, not terribly far from Langley.

  The jet and its cargo were wheels-up as the dawn sun rose over the heights above and began to dapple the waters of the Mediterranean.

  CHAPTER 23

  USAF BASE, ARIANO, ITALY

  Dana Morton did what Waylon Griggs would have done. She thought of what a hard-assed son of a bitch would do and then did that.

  She pushed and shoved and assembled a team of geeks from agency stations all over Europe. It was all done from the cavernous cargo area of a Globemaster bound for Ariano from Andrews AFB. In the back of the monstrous aircraft she sat at a makeshift desk, by pallet loads of MRES and aircraft engines strapped down to the deck. She was on the phone to embassies, consulates, front companies, and surveillance teams, and using all the juice that the Young-El pursuit gave her and then some. When that didn't work she lied and invoked the name of the director and even the president and prayed none of it came back to bite her in the ass.

  By the time she touched down in Italy there was a computer lab cobbled together and already up and running in a hangar along runway nine.

  Seven very serious men and one woman had the FlopFlip hard drives out and were putting them through classified search programs. More were arriving by plane and car. Within an hour of Dana's arrival they had a short list of FlopFlip subscribers who had downloaded Red Eagle 3 in the designated timeframe. They whittled the list down to an even twenty. Six of those were in the Pacific Rim region where the agency strongly suspected the Young-El network was based.

  Now it was a matter of elimination. They would find the IP address of each of these users and take a long hard look at their histories and recent activities. These would be compared to the meager amount of data they had on Young-El to see what jumped out. One of the six subscribers was tied to Young-El by some connection, or even called the cell's hidden lair home. There were methods of finding out which of the six was their man and they were using all of them.

  Dana smiled. They were a step closer to the assholes who reached out from half a world away to murder her boss and mentor.

  It was a thread. Now to pull on it. Hard.

  CHAPTER 24

  LOCATION UNDISCLOSED

  "Batang Sedong."

  Walid al Azarri said nothing in reply. He was in yet another dim, windowless room talking to strangers through a translator. This time they had a tiny video camera trained on him. It sat across the table from him on a tripod. He stood balanced on a pair of crutches. His legs were still in tremendous pain. It was painful to sit, but less so to stand. The leg that was no longer there hurt most of all. They gave him very few painkillers, and he would not give them the satisfaction of asking for more. His body ran with sweat.

  "Serian."

  Walid said nothing.

  "Kampung Kakai."

  He said nothing.

  These sounded like the names of places. They were unknown to him. But he would not let them know that. He stared into the camera lens with a flat expression of contempt as they read their list. He stood like a disagreeable statue through at least fifty place names now.

  "Riih Daso."

  Was that a place or a person? He gave them no response.

  "Tamin Pasir."

  He knew this place. He had heard its name before. He remained impassive.

  Around the other side of the planet, in the makeshift geek lair at Ariano, Dana sat forward in her chair.

  "Did you see that?" she said.

  Two agents leaned forward with her and studied the sixty-two-inch monitor, now filled side to side and top to bottom with the sourpuss face of Walid al Azarri (now nicknamed "The Gimp" by the agents).