assumed “immediately” meant this very second. What in the world could be so urgent? Thoroughly alarmed now, Diana accessed Oracle’s database, or at least the superficial levels of it available over the Internet, and plugged in the reference number. She waited, tense, while the system retrieved the analysis in question. Most of the assessments the Oracle database had fed her recently were bogus, and her repeated proposals of these eventually unfounded threats to her superiors had earned her a host of rumors that she’d lost her edge completely. But this one… Straight from Delphi? Did she dare believe it, if this “bit of information” turned out to be yet another wildly off-the-wall speculation?
The threat analysis popped up onto the screen. She scrolled down through the lengthy write-up to the end where the thumbnail summary of the problem was traditionally placed. Tonight, this section was surprisingly short. She scanned the words quickly. And lurched upright in her seat at the report’s terse conclusion.
A person or persons will attempt to assassinate President-elect Gabriel Monihan within the next twenty-four hours. You must stop them.
4:00 A.M.
A rather alarming bit of information, indeed! Urgently, she paged through the rest of the report, scanning the facts and assumptions the massive Oracle database used to arrive at its conclusion. Of course, large sections of the analysis were not transmitted to her here. They were deemed too sensitive to transit the Internet where they risked being intercepted. If she wanted to read the full text, she’d have to go down to the Oracle office and do it in person. But, at a glance, the logic looked sound. Not that she seriously expected anything else. Despite its recent flubs, the program was a masterpiece of computer software engineering.
She grabbed her black leather duster, a nearly ankle-length coat that billowed menacingly when she strode along a windy street. It made her feel like a gunslinger straight out of the Wild West. Plus, it had great pockets that stored a host of doo-dads and gadgets. Heck, it could swallow up an automatic rifle if it had to. Not that a desk jockey like her needed that feature often, of course. The coat also helped her blend into the gothic subculture of hackers and society dropouts from whom she got some of her best intelligence tips. Best of all, it drove her ultraconservative boss at the Defense Intelligence Agency crazy. And that was all the reason she needed to wear it.
She climbed into her sporty German coupe and backed out of the driveway. She steered down the winding, tree-lined streets of Bethesda, Maryland southward toward Alexandria, Virginia and its Old Town neighborhood where Oracle made its home.
Rock Creek Parkway and the gorgeous park it wound through was deserted at this time of morning with only a few delivery trucks and graveyard shifters on the road. And that was probably why she spotted the piece-of-shit sedan tailing her about a quarter-mile back. She’d lay odds it was Army Intel. The driver’s movements were so precisely according to the Army training manual that it couldn’t possibly be anyone else back there. Besides, no self-respecting FBI agent would be caught dead in a gutless heap like that. And surely the intruder from her house wasn’t so brash that he’d follow her this soon after his getaway. He’d been worried about getting caught. No way would he expose himself openly again. Especially if her hunch about his identity was correct.
She could weed out anybody else by process of elimination. She had no other major investigations open. Every thug she’d helped catch in recent memory was safely behind bars. The other conspiracy theories she was developing at the moment involved political or economic forces that had no human face. But, she’d spent the last three months on the Internet day and night, slowly worming herself inside a terrorist organization known as the Q-Rajn, or Q-group. After that bunch had nearly killed her Athena Academy classmate and NSA code-breaker pal, Kim Valenti, she’d been put on the trail of the Q-group as well. Kim had cracked a code the terrorists were using and foiled a suicide bombing the group was planning in Chicago, but was nearly killed herself in the process. Immediately after the incident, Delphi had assigned Diana to take over the hunt for Q-group and search for any possible reason the terrorists might want to kill Gabe Monihan. Personally, she thought the link between the Q-group and Monihan was tenuous at best. Until tonight. Now, all bets were off. And despite recent busts of local Q-group headquarters in several states, they were still capable of mounting a break-in at her house. And they were certainly capable of trying to kill the President-elect of the United States.
The Q-group was comprised of ex-patriot citizens of a tiny country called Berzhaan, which made up for its small size by brewing bucketloads of international political upheaval. The Q-group was devoted to overthrowing the current regime in its homeland. Historically, they operated only on Berzhaani soil. But all that had changed last October, when they’d taken over a Chicago news station as a diversion and then attempted to set off a bomb at Chicago O’Hare, one of the busiest and highest profile airports in the world. The Q-group had claimed that the attack was an effort to stop U.S. aid to rebels in Berzhaan who wanted to overthrow the country. But she’d never bought that explanation. Why wouldn’t these guys just protest on the steps of the United Nations or hold press conferences demanding a change in U.S. foreign policy? No, they’d had some other goal in mind.
And that’s what she’d been trying to pinpoint for the last couple of months. She’d found a chat room on the Internet where she believed these guys reported to their superiors, received instructions and obtained the money and resources for their activities. Of course, an elaborate series of code words and phrases was employed, so a perfectly innocuous chat about World Cup Soccer scores or a visit with family members might actually be a discussion of which target had been chosen for their next attack. But gradually, she’d been able to identify different combinations of meaning until the hidden subtext of the chats was becoming clear to her.
In fact, she’d turned her attention to ferreting out the real identities of the terrorists in the last few days. It was painstaking work, tracing the electronic transmissions backward through layers of Internet servers to their points of origin. But, once she nailed down the home server for each terrorist, she’d be able to approach that server’s operator with a warrant and obtain the actual customer account information, complete with names, addresses and credit card numbers. Given another couple of weeks, she ought to be able to name everyone in the Q-group’s American network.
Except, if Delphi was right, she didn’t have that long.
Her gut instincts screamed that the Q-group was not only behind the break-in at her house, but also any attack that might be imminent against President-to-be Gabe Monihan.
She rolled down Massachusetts Avenue and its stately rows of foreign embassies, and took surface streets toward Route 1, which ran south past the Pentagon and down into Alexandria, passing through the Old Town section of that Virginia suburb. She watched her rearview mirror carefully as she turned onto the wide semihighway. Yup, the sedan behind her made the turnoff. Damn. She couldn’t lead anyone to Oracle’s doorstep! Not the Q-group, and definitely not the Army. Oracle existed outside of the government, outside of private enterprise, outside of any system, in fact. It was a force unto itself and needed to stay that way, buried deep where nobody but a select few even knew of its existence.
The good news was she had a fast and maneuverable car and her followers did not. She approached a major intersection in the multilane road and turned off it at the very last second, crossing a couple of lanes of traffic at high speed to do so. The street was deserted so the maneuver wasn’t dangerous per se, but it was darned hard to miss. If her tail was going to stay with her, he’d have to pull a similar stunt and point himself out to her in spectacular fashion. The Army training manual on a one-car pursuit said he’d go ahead and make that highly visible turn if it was more important not to lose the quarry than to be stealthy. In her experience, Army Intel wasn’t too hung up on stealth and generally adhered to the brute-force theory of doing business.
Her car held the sharp swerve of the turnoff beautifully. The tail
