Cyber Warfare (INTERCEPT: A Jack Coyote Thriller Book 2) Read online

  “I am the resurrection and the life! The one who believes in me will live, even though they die; and whoever lives by believing in me will never die, sayeth the Lord!” The fiend—for he was a fiend and not a man—was well pleased.

  Wheels squealed. The train braked to a stop but much too late. The station hushed on held breaths. Silence crept along the platform. Terror gave way to horror as witness after witness cried out. Two courageous onlookers rushed to the victim’s rescue—jumping onto the tracks and scrambling on their bellies to reach her—only to recoil by what they witnessed and getting sick.

  The dude grinned.

  Believing for one crazy instant he was some sort of superman, Jack charged him. He wasn’t thinking. He only wanted to get his hands on him, somehow take him down, beat the crap out of him, and squeeze the life out of him.

  The killer pounced like a panther.

  With a twist and a flip, Jack was tossed onto the flat of his back. He found himself gasping for air, eyes blinking up at the swirling coffered ceiling. After a count of five seconds, ten, fifteen, he inhaled a single straining breath. Then a second. And a third. He regained his bearings. Hoisted himself into a sitting position. And shook off faintness.

  The dude was already strolling off, hands plunged into the pockets of his cargo pants as if he hadn’t a care in the world. He stepped on the escalator and rode it to the top, only once glancing back at Jack, a waggish expression on his face.

  Jack pushed unsteadily to his feet, lightheaded, breaths arriving in heaving gulps. A kindhearted fool of a woman came to his assistance, asking if he was okay. He brushed her aside and gave chase, struggling to stay upright, undoubtedly looking like a drunkard on his last legs. He bolted up the stairs. Rummaged in his backpack. Put his hand on the semiautomatic. Gripped the handle. Lowered the weapon at his side. Crooked his finger around the trigger. By the time he reached the upper level, the killer was gone. Passengers were bustling back and forth, oblivious of the tragedy that happened down below. The throw of the dice had spared them. Not so for an unlucky woman minding her own business on a sweltering summer day in July.

  He turned and fled, and burst onto the congested city street, sunlight blinding him. A quick reconnaissance revealed no sign of the killer. He had vanished like a specter. Jack hailed a taxi and breathlessly ordered the driver to take him to the Rosslyn station on the Orange Line.

  “The Red Line’s right behind you, buddy. You can transfer.”

  “There’s been an accident. There won’t be any trains for a while.”

  The hack gave his fare an anxious look, nodded once, tripped the meter, and headed out.

  After the cabbie dropped him off, Jack hiked over to the Blue Line and took it to the end of the line in Fairfax County, where he hailed another taxi and asked the driver to take him to the most popular trucker’s diner in town. He wasn’t hungry. In fact, he didn’t think he could stomach a thing. But where there was a good diner, there was bound to be a motel where anonymity would become his best friend.

  When the cabdriver dropped him off, Jack waved pleasantly before crossing the highway and checking into the roadside motel.

  2

  Vienna, Virginia

  Friday, July 25

  THE FIFTEEN-MILE commute took Cordelia Burke from Georgetown to Spook City, otherwise known as Vienna, Virginia, and to a gleaming high-rise office building conveniently situated down the road from the CIA.

  Rows of soft-sided cubicles were filled with formidable talents gathered from the IRS, FBI, DEA, INS, ICE, and AFT. Specialists from the Secret Service and U.S. Customs rounded out the government side. Hotshot cyber-nerds recruited from the Silicon Valley and the best engineering schools in the country filled the technical slots. And certified public accountants occupied the administrative posts. They had come together to serve the special needs of the high-tech, somewhat classified, sometimes vilified agency known as the Monetary Compliance Network, or MonCom for short.

  Acting as the unsung but powerful arm of the U.S. Treasury Department as well as a secret weapon of the Department of Justice, MonCom leased the seventh, eighth and ninth floors. Entry into the building was access-controlled. Visitors had to sign in and present IDs before being escorted into the inner sanctum. Employees always wore electronic badges. The walls possessed the surgical chill of an operating room. The floors were designed with an intricate maze seemingly put together by grade-school children playing with building blocks. The carpet was neutral, the walls boring beige, and the lavatories dreary. When Cordelia walked the corridors, she had the distinct impression of being watched.

  The agency held a unique place in the intelligence-gathering community. Follow the money was its motto and tracking the digital tracks of soiled currency its mission. Authorized under the Banking Security Act, MonCom fed, fertilized, and watered an enormous database devoted to the systematic collection, collation, and cross-analysis of financial transactions pumped throughout the U.S. monetary system and the global village at large. The agency operated under similar protocols as CPA firms, but instead of stamping its approval on corporate annual reports, used its mandated powers to counteract financial misconduct. Forgery, embezzlement, counterfeiting, kiting, credit card theft, and money laundering were the means. Drug trafficking, misuse of campaign financing, illegal gambling, bogus charitable contributions, corporate rip-offs, tax evasion, terrorist funding, hush money, and bribery were the indictable offenses. That the CIA was a close ally was denied from Capitol Hill to the White House.

  Two years ago, when Cordelia went in for the round of interviews that landed her the job, she was pink-cheeked with enthusiasm. Agog at the clean walls, the endless corridors, the throbbing pulse, the semiprivate cubicle she would call home, and the latest in techno-gadgets perched on her desk, she instantly became enamored of the stainless-steel gleam. Technically she was a financial analyst, but the title of Data Research Specialist in the Illicit Finance Methodologies division rolled nicely off the tongue, especially for an auditor straight out of one of the biggest accounting firms in the country. She wanted the job. Cordelia wanted the job so badly she was willing to leave Chicago. Two weeks after accepting the offer, she transported her meager belongings in a hauling trailer, and with the help of her boyfriend, settled down at breakneck speed. Shortly after unpacking the last carton, she got the whammy between the eyes, a vision of truth and the American way. Instead of the adventure of a lifetime, she had signed up for a stint of tedious analysis, paper shuffling, and boring meetings. She also witnessed firsthand how the government intruded into private lives. MonCom may have worn the white hat of nobility and grace by going after the bad guys, but the agency accomplished its mandate by also sweeping up the earnings, savings, and spending habits of the public. Privacy was an ideal of the past, even if the average citizen walking down the street did not realize his life had been codified into an electronic blip.

  Projects, reports, and emails awaited her attention. She ignored them. Instead, she logged onto her computer, input a string of Boolean queries, and initiated a search.

  The bank retrieval system contained some quadrillion transactions documenting every monetary withdrawal and deposit exceeding ten thousand dollars. Coupled with real-time monitoring of the electronic banking system, MonCom’s artificial intelligence software continually scanned incoming data to identify suspicious dollar movements with supercomputer efficiency. Reams of reports and analyses were spit out at regular intervals and routed to data research specialists just like her for further investigation.

  Cordelia had a different goal in mind. The manual searches she made were for the unusual, which meant pushing aside mundane daily tasks and taking advantage of every opportunity to find that one unique transaction or pattern of transactions everyone else had missed. It was a thankless job requiring her to slog through hundreds of queries and millions of records. Everyone knew what she was up to. Few appreciated her extracurricular activities. They called her many names. Burke. Buddha.
Bitch. She didn’t give a damn what they called her, so long as she received credit for credit due.

  Last night she found something intriguing. Something solid. Something that everyone else would have missed. Something that could earn her a promotion, or if not a promotion, then recognition and respect. She downloaded a comprehensive data dump. Sorted thousands of records by date, time stamp, financial institution, locale, transaction amount, source, destination, and digital fingerprint. Made notes and summarized findings. Constructed and analyzed relational database tables. Isolated the relevant from the irrelevant. And struggled to find a central thesis that would make sense.

  “Talking to yourself again?” On his usual rounds, Jon Taggert stopped by her cubicle, smiling at her with grit teeth and stiff jaw. The artificial smile did not mean he was happy. Just the reverse.

  Taggert almost always looked as if he had slept on the couch the night before. His sartorial presence included rolled-up shirtsleeves, crooked ties, wrinkled slacks, scuffed loafers, and a permanent five o’clock shadow. It wasn’t that he didn’t sleep well or that his wife refused him their bed. He just didn’t give a damn how he looked in the halls of government, provided his department exceeded expectations and toed the line.

  “And you’re late,” he said.

  “Dentist appointment,” she said, feigning an honest face.

  As division head and her direct supervisor, Taggert took on a brotherly role, watching out for her, listening to her troubles, and protecting her whenever possible, all while coveting her from behind brooding eyes and salacious grins. “From the look in your eyes, you found something, didn’t you?”

  Cordelia may have passed her CPA examine on the first try and may have earned her spurs by working a stint in the public sector, but she wasn’t prepared for MonCom. Brainy she was. Sly she wasn’t. Crooks used a dirty set of tricks to accumulate wealth and cover up wrongdoings. As a data research specialist, she used a similar set of tricks to trap them. It all came down to who wore a government badge and who did not. So the job wasn’t as glamorous or hygienic as she thought. So Cordelia Burke was just one more data research specialist in a sea of data research specialists. So she could make it work. Give it one month, three months, six. Eventually she would find a cozy niche and stand out. Six months turned into a year, and a year into two.

  “Found something …?” she said vaguely, struggling not to blink.

  Taggert grinned with satisfaction. He wasn’t merely a smart man. He had eyes at the back of his head and antennae hidden beneath his coal-dark hair. Nudging his head, he said, “Let’s take a walk.”

  What she had run across wasn’t for eavesdroppers. He knew it without asking. Besides, he was a man who couldn’t sit still, a man constantly on the move, a man on a mission, a man who flossed his teeth with the point of a penknife, a man who worshipped before the altar of power, and as Cordelia had learned, a man who greased the wheels for himself and those he respected.

  Her twentieth random search had yielded four transactions transferred from four stateside brokerages and wired independently to an offshore tax haven located in George Town, Grand Cayman. Even after treaty signing and toeing the line of fiscal responsibility, the Cayman Islands fostered an entre nous lack of cooperation with U.S. authorities. When a gatecrasher suddenly began transferring sizeable dollar amounts into a branch of Hertford International, he might as well hoist a red flag. The inevitable conjectures were racketeering, drugs, gambling, and other forms of illicitly derived income. Together the four wires exceeded fifty million dollars. Ten thousand was the minimum benchmark to arouse suspicion but given that millions were pumped throughout the banking system at a faster clip than the speed of light, fifty million was a mere eyeblink on a flickering screen. Cordelia was still curious.

  The account holder used a vanilla name wrapped inside a manila envelope, not the usual modus operandi. Illegal entities usually hid behind international business corporations and bank trustees that shielded the true identities of individuals, partnerships, organizations, corporations, shareholders, and board members. This account was held in a single man’s name, out in the open, and without using any of the standard artifices to hide ownership. At first glance, he appeared to be an average individual trying to dodge U.S. tax laws. But he wasn’t a known criminal. Nor did he associate with known criminals. Nor did he make his living through questionable means, unless he was using an alias, likely enough. In fact, she couldn’t find a record of him anywhere, including the U.S. Passport Agency, state DMVs, credit agencies, and the IRS.

  “I found a series of suspicious wire transfers and possible money laundering.”

  Taggert almost never revealed anything from behind his dark eyes and professional demeanor, but this time he gave himself away with the tiniest stretching of his eyelids. “Terrorist network? Drug cartel?”

  She had no proof, no confirmable links, and no head-turning evidence other than intuition and guesswork. When the data popped up, she had been sprawled on her living room sofa, air conditioning blowing on her face and cable news blaring in the background. She pondered her find. Terrorists, drug cartels, oligarchs, and crime syndicates were the usual suspects, but there were other possibilities. An accountant embezzling liquid assets from his employer’s balance sheet. A CFO engaged in creative accounting. A private party transferring funds to overseas hostage-takers. A foreign investor making a sweetheart deal for political favors. An illegal purchase of rocket launchers and fissionable material. A hedge fund manager hiding profits. A corporate officer setting aside bonuses and stock options before his company announced disappointing earnings. A politician squirreling away campaign contributions for his upcoming retirement.

  Expecting to see the fifty million go out the back end, she made several more queries and picked up a trail. Within twenty-four hours, the money was transferred to a less notable Cayman Islands bank. A day later, the millions were moved yet again, this time the tracks snaking in and out of so many overseas tax havens that the trail diverged and finally vanished. It didn’t daunt her. Still excited she was onto something big, she expected to find several more millions coming in the front end, possibly mixed with smaller lump sums of less than ten thousand dollars. But after another round of inputting queries and analyzing data, she drew blanks.

  “I’m not sure.” Cordelia was out of breath from keeping up with him. “It just doesn’t look right. Not to me, at least.”

  “I trust your instincts.”

  After being around MonCom for a few months, she discovered where the rawest sleuthing took place. Squirreled away in an isolated bullpen tucked between a utility closet and a copy room, a few highfliers under the age of thirty had collaborated on a series of headline-grabbing busts. After Cordelia appealed to their stomachs with premium coffee, takeout pizza, and homemade brownies, they invited her to join their club. She couldn’t have made a better move even if the drawbacks were glaring. The whiz kids, as they called themselves, were good. They were better than good. Like Cordelia, they had been underestimated, underappreciated, and underpaid. By tapping into the convoluted workings of the criminal mind, they became the hunters, as devious and nefarious as the hunted. State’s attorneys and federal prosecutors came to rely on MonCom’s reprobates, one hand washing the other as it were, especially when state cases could be reassigned to federal jurisdiction. The slipperier the perpetrator and the more complicated the scheme, the more challenging the job and the greater the reward. The whiz kids had garnered a bad-ass reputation. Eventually they drew lots for the bigger assignments. Cordelia was usually left out. Sometimes they threw her a bone. These days they were throwing her a bone more often, but she decided to strike out on her own.

  “Excuse me. Did you just say you trust my instincts?”

  “Get used to it.”

  “All right then.” She sniffed in a breath and held it before saying, “Since the money was wired to several overseas tax havens, I thought it had to be a terrorist group. Except―”
/>   He pounced on her tentativeness. “Except …?”

  “Except it might be connected to national security.”

  “Whose national security?”

  “Don’t be a wiseass.”

  He turned his head, his expression both interested and suspicious. “What clued you in?”

  “The electronic fingerprints of the wire transfers. They pointed straight to the D. C. area.”

  When Taggert found out she was working behind his back, he called her into his office for one of his classic rants. “Hell, all you whiz kids work on the sly. Crawling on your bellies. Wallowing in slimy creeks. Turning over moss-covered stones. But get this into your thick skull, Burke. I won’t have independent operators on my staff. I want to be buried under stacks of memos and white papers, even if it means putting in weekends and holidays. I intend to stay one step of ahead of you. Be forewarned, I’m quick on the uptake. I trust no one and no one trusts me. Whatever you unearth, I want to be the first to know about it. Otherwise, you’ll be out on your ass.” He had shown his hand, pretending he didn’t appreciate her extracurricular activities but secretly condoning them.

  “There’s something else,” Cordelia said. “Something that doesn’t sit right.”

  He raised his eyebrows.

  “One of the intermediary banks is in Kansas City.”

  “Let me guess. Kansas City Federalist.”

  She nodded. The bank was notorious for money laundering, especially when it involved the country’s most potent foe. What’s the timeworn rubric? Keep your friends close and your enemies closer? In this case, it wasn’t America’s political enemy but its economic enemy.