Death Mask. Alex Archer

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СКАЧАТЬ a strong connection between this place, the Grand Inquisitor and the city of Valladolid. She checked her watch. She could make the ride in an hour, ignoring speed limits, but first she had to meet Roux’s hacker.

       4

      22:30—Ávila

      Annja had to ask for directions to Giorgio’s. It wasn’t on the main drag, but rather tucked away on a quaint side street that, as she walked down it, gave her the distinct impression of time travel. Each step seemed to take her back a decade until she was somewhere around the fifteenth or sixteenth century, surrounded by amazing buildings that had withstood the Inquisition and the civil war and the ravages of change. Giorgio’s was one of those hip spots where the beautiful people went and made sure that everyone else knew just how hip it was.

      Annja checked her reflection in the Roadster’s side mirror, the bike helmet in her hand, long hair spilling over bike leathers. She grinned. She certainly didn’t resemble some young, upwardly mobile stockbroker, or a woman in search of one.

      She opened the door, and even before she’d taken her first step inside, she received a mixture of looks from the clientele that could have frozen a penguin on an ice floe. The women scowled in disapproval, sneering at the skintight leathers, while the men leaned forward, interested, engaged. She ignored both. She was used to being stared at. It was part of being a celebrity. Even if she wasn’t a big star, there was always someone on the street who would do a double take, obviously thinking, Aren’t you the woman from the TV show?

      She scanned the room. There were at least a dozen guys sitting alone in different parts of the café. A few had shot a glance—or more than a glance—in her direction, but none of them had raised a hand in recognition. She didn’t hold any of their gazes, and it didn’t take long for most of them to look away, drawn back to their computer screens and cell phones. As she walked toward the counter at the far side of the café, she noticed that one man was still watching her. There was a paperback copy of Howard Fast’s Torquemada next to his untouched cappuccino. That was enough to convince Annja he was her guy.

      She walked to his table and sat down.

      “Annja,” the young man said. He didn’t rise to shake her hand. And unlike the rest of the men in the vicinity, he didn’t appear to be mentally stripping her leathers. “You made good time. I’m Oscar.”

      She sat down across from him. He was barely old enough to be out of university, but when it came to tech wizardry it was a case of “the younger, the better” these days. His tousled, sun-bleached hair was stylishly unkempt. He fit in here far more than she did. His olive skin was offset against a white cotton shirt. Not that she was one to judge a book by its cover, but this kid was the polar opposite of every computer nerd she’d ever met. She didn’t know what to make of that, but Roux trusted him with Garin’s life. She knew that much.

      “So, the old man said you needed to trace the source of a video stream, right? Shouldn’t be too difficult.” He held his hand out across the table. For a weird second she thought he was asking her to dance, but then she realized he wanted her phone. She handed it over. “You go order a drink,” he said. “I’ll see what I can do.”

      She watched as he connected the phone to his laptop via USB cable. As soon as the jack went in, Oscar was lost in concentration. Stylish or not, he was definitely a tech nerd.

      Annja ordered herself a latte from the barista. Drink in hand, she rejoined him at the table, but didn’t say a word. The meeting wasn’t about social niceties; it was about helping Garin, plain and simple. And in any case, the kid was absolutely oblivious to the rest of the world, his entire focus zoned down to the screen in front of him. The coffee was hot but good and went down creamy.

      “Okay,” Oscar said after a few seconds, though he wasn’t talking to her. “Good. Yes. Okay...no. Not good.” He looked up at her across the top of the laptop. “Whoever wrote this code knows their stuff. And they’re determined to stay hidden. The signal is being bounced through half a dozen countries, via anonymous routers, and each connection in the chain is changing its IP addresses every minute or so. It’s not impossible to trace, but it’s not easy. For a start, it’s going to take time to crack the algorithm they’re using to cycle through IP addresses, so we can predict where they’re going to switch to next and keep the line open long enough to trace it all the way back to source.”

      Annja had a decent idea what he was talking about, but there was a huge difference between a decent idea and the kind of understanding the hacker obviously had.

      “But you can trace it?” she asked.

      He nodded.

      “Good. That’s all I needed to hear.”

      His fingers moved quickly across the keyboard, picking out commands in rapid-fire succession, then pausing a beat as he waited for responses to come back to him.

      Oscar swore under his breath, suddenly working faster.

      “There’s a worm embedded in the file,” he said. “It’s trying to take over my system. It’s got the processor going crazy, and the core temp is rising. I think it’s trying to blow my battery. Ingenious bastard. Well, at least this is going to be fun now.”

      He turned the machine slightly so Annja could see what was happening—not that she knew what she was looking at beyond a guy hammering out what seemed to be random letters on a keyboard.

      “I’m just making sure I’ve got a backup of everything here. Assume the worst,” he said, but even as he spoke, streams of numbers and letters filled the screen, superimposed with picture after picture. The deepening furrow in the hacker’s brow worried her. So much for “shouldn’t be too difficult.”

      He swore again and killed the Net connection, disabling the Wi-Fi. That didn’t slow the virus now that it was in his hard drive, and it continued chewing up data and spitting it out again, faster and faster until trying to focus on it hurt Annja’s eyes. The fan whined as the first faint whiff of smoke curled up from beneath the laptop.

      Oscar acted quickly, closing the lid and flipping the machine over.

      It took two hands to release the catch and pop the battery, but the second he did it heads turned, drawn by the stench of burning.

      He dropped the battery, staring at the smoldering plastic housing as if his entire understanding of the world had just been betrayed.

      “What the hell just happened?” Annja asked.

      “Some serious piece of code. Some seriously serious piece of code. The virus overloaded the system resources, then created a surge back into the battery. That’s not an easy thing.”

      “So we’re up against someone who knows what they’re doing—IP masking, making computers burn up...”

      “Yep, we’re not talking spotty teenagers in their bedroom, that’s for sure.”

      “Is there anything you can do?”

      He looked at the sorry state of the battery. “This thing’s fried, but there’s always something that can be done if you’re resourceful enough,” he said, fishing inside his laptop bag for a small device that he connected to her phone. “I’m going to make an image of your phone—basically clone it—and see if I can trick the code into thinking it’s your phone that’s СКАЧАТЬ