Conspiracy Game Read online

  Jack and Ken had made a pact together, a sacred oath, that neither would ever risk destroying a woman the way their father had their mother. His father had loathed them, twin boys who took up their mother's time, received her smiles--and her love. There were beatings that became more and more vicious as his obsession grew.

  God help him, Jack felt that way about Briony--that terrible need to keep her to himself, to hold on too tight. He couldn't fool himself into thinking he wasn't already a little obsessed. He was capable of killing--had done so before he was in his teens--and now, faced with looking at the monster he'd become--he had to give her up. She deserved a normal man--one capable of loving without possession and jealousy and fear. It was the only gift he could give her. He knew, when he walked away, that no other woman would ever do, but he couldn't take her and watch her innocence and light slowly fade, to be replaced by fear the way it had been in his mother.

  Briony stirred, murmured his name in her sleep, and reached for him. His heart clenched hard. He leaned close to her. "Once I'm gone, Briony, don't come near me again," he whispered. "Not ever, because I'll never be able to give you up twice."

  Her eyes opened and she smiled at him. "I was dreaming about you."

  His stomach churned and he bent to kiss her. He shouldn't. He knew better, but it was damned hard to let go. "I've got to get out of here. My ride's waiting."

  She sat up, pushing at the silky hair, a small frown on her face. "Is it safe? Are you certain it's safe, Jack?"

  "It's safe enough." He stood up and slung the rifle around his neck. "Thanks for everything."

  Briony swallowed hard, resisting the need to cling to him. Of course he had to go, but he hadn't said one word about seeing her again. Not one. She caught his hand. "Jack." She said his name softly. "How are we going to find one another?"

  He pulled his hand away, rubbed his palm down his thigh as if the gesture simply wiped her away. "We aren't. You didn't think this was going to go anywhere, did you? I'm not the kind of man who settles down with a woman and kids in a house with a white picket fence. You knew that going into it. You'd be a liability to me."

  Briony never took her eyes from his face. His features were set and hard--carved of stone--eyes as cold as ice. Jack betrayed absolutely no emotion. She could have been looking at a total stranger. Her heart crumbled into tiny pieces. She heard her own wail, a long, drawn-out cry of anguish, but it was only in her own mind--and she had enough pride to keep her shields up stronger than ever so he couldn't hear the weeping in her head. He couldn't know just how much she'd invested in him--how much of a fool she'd really been.

  "I see." It was all she could get out. She should have looked ahead, should have known he would be capable of walking away without a backward glance. She kept her eyes on his face, hoping for one small sign that she'd meant the same things to him that he had to her. "Good luck then, Jack."

  He turned away from her, an abrupt motion, and walked out the door. Not once did he look back. Briony knew because she watched him through the window, all the way, until he was out of sight. She sat on the bed until dawn, unmoving, without a single tear, feeling numb--frozen--feeling as if he'd torn out her heart and taken it with him. She felt a fool for even thinking they had something special. Jack took her gift of love and trust and flung it back in her face. She stayed very still--very small--wishing she could just disappear. She stayed there on the edge of the bed until Jebediah pounded on her door to tell her it was time to face the day and another performance.

  CHAPTER 6

  Twelve hours earlier...

  The Special Forces GhostWalker team gathered together in the California home of Lily Whitney-Miller, daughter of Dr. Peter Whitney. They grouped together in the war room, where they met regularly, knowing the room was impossible to bug.

  "Do we know if he's still alive?" Kadan Montegue asked as he spread the aerial maps of the Republic of the Congo across the table.

  "If there's one person who has a chance of escaping the rebel camp and making it out of the jungle alive, it's Jack Norton," Nicolas Trevane replied.

  "General Ekabela is the most bloodthirsty of all the rebels in the region," Captain Ryland Miller added with a small sigh. "The general's troops are mostly veterans in combat. Most of his men were in the military before everything went to hell there."

  "It seems to me, as long as I can remember, it's always been hell in the Congo," Nicolas said. "Ekabela had done more damage to that region, destroying entire villages and towns, committing genocide, but he's as elusive as hell and well funded."

  "He controls the marijuana traffic and has major backing by someone here in the U.S. None of his prisoners have ever lasted more than a couple of days. He's particularly ruthless when it comes to torture. Ken Norton was in bad shape and they'd only had him about ten hours. Ken's still in the hospital," Ryland pointed out. "They nearly skinned him alive, not to mention sliced his body into tiny pieces. If Ekabela has Jack, he has only a few hours to escape before they do worse to him."

  Kadan tapped his finger on the map. "Ekabela is on the move. He isn't going to take any chances with Jack. What the hell was that senator thinking, flying over the Congo in the no-fly zone? And what was some hotshot military scientist doing in a region as hot as the Congo?"

  "That's just the thing," Dr. Lily Whitney-Miller said. She stepped out of the corner where she'd been observing the GhostWalker team as they met together for the briefing. "The small jet that was shot down in the Congo is the same plane that landed at the airport outside of New Orleans when Dahlia's home was attacked."

  "What's even more interesting," Ryland said, "is that Ekabela didn't kill the pilot or the scientific team. And when Ken Norton's squad went into the Congo to rescue the senator, Ekabela was waiting for him."

  Kadan held up his hand. "You think Ekabela was tipped off that the GhostWalker team was conducting a rescue? How would that be possible?"

  Ryland nodded. "I'm sure of it. Ken was able to get the senator, the research team, and the pilot out. Why would Ekabela keep the pilot alive? He wasn't worth anything at all."

  "Of more significance," Lily added, "the plane went down with supposed engine trouble, yet no one was injured, and Ekabela didn't have the pilot and research team tortured and killed as he normally does with anyone not of monetary or political use to him. The rebels were waiting to ambush the rescue team. Even with that, the GhostWalkers were able to pull out the senator, and everyone else, although in the process, Ken Norton was captured. Ekabela didn't waste any time torturing Ken."

  "Even of more significance is the fact that the rebels went for Ken--singled him out. That's how he was cut off," Logan Maxwell added. He was the only member of the SEAL GhostWalker squad present. Ken and Jack Norton were both members of his team. "They were waiting for him. I was there. They could have fought to keep their prisoners, but they were more interested in acquiring Ken."

  "Specifically Ken? Not just any GhostWalker?" Lily asked.

  "Specifically Ken," Logan reiterated. There was sudden silence in the briefing room. Members of the GhostWalker team sank into chairs around the table. "Who could have tipped Ekabela off?"

  "I don't know how much you know about Dr. Whitney's original experiment, when he first began to use human subjects for physical and psychic enhancement," Lily said to Logan.

  "Jesse informed us, ma'am," Logan Maxwell admitted. "We know he took orphans from overseas, all girls, and enhanced them first. After perfecting his technique, he enhanced the first team." He gestured around the room to encompass the men and women. "And then ours."

  "Everyone, including me, believed my father, Dr. Whitney, was murdered. We no longer are certain that's true. We suspect not only that he is alive, but that he has enhanced his own personal army and is conducting experiments with the sanction of someone in the military and someone very high up in the government. We believe there is a conspiracy to engineer the perfect human weapons and that conspiracy involves my father, perhaps the senator
you rescued, and definitely members of the military and/or other covert government agencies."

  Logan looked around him. "This place is a fortress. How could Whitney, or anyone else, get ahold of your plans? Or our plans, for that matter. It was my team that came up with the plan to rescue first the senator and, then again, Ken Norton. They were waiting for us when we went in after Ken. Jack provided covering fire, took a hit, and went down. He signaled us to get out of there, and frankly, if we hadn't, we'd all be dead. Ekabela wasn't playing games; he wanted us dead. And they wanted Jack. We've tried twice to rescue him or recover his body, but they're moving camps so fast our information is always hours late. General Ekabela definitely tried to kill all of us, and he's had traps in every camp we've hit. Fortunately we've managed to avoid them."

  "Which just reinforces the idea that Ekabela should have killed everyone but the senator. So why didn't he?" Ryland asked.

  "We've known all along that all of the computers we use here at the house and at the Donovans Corporation belonged to my father. Most of the software programs were either written or modified by him. The datastores use a proprietary, encrypted format. There's no way to even access data except by using the program he wrote--although the raw data could be manually transferred from his programs to another by pulling it up on the terminal and transcribing it into another terminal...but that wouldn't get you whatever evaluation formulas were written into his software codes. Obviously if he were alive, and had planned to disappear but wanted to see what we were doing, he would have left himself a back door to monitor the computers. There are fifteen computers here in this house, counting mine, the ones in the lab, and the ones in his office, as well as his personal one in his room. There are over a hundred at the Donovans Corporation, where both of us worked. Dad was the majority shareholder and now Whitney Trust is."

  "And you need his data so you can't very well wipe everything clean, can you?" Logan asked.

  "Exactly." Lily tapped the end of her pencil on the tabletop. "If someone could access our computers, they would know every move we make. And they could certainly make educated guesses based on data collected on any given move we make." She glanced at the woman sitting quietly in the back of the room. "Flame brought it to our attention and we all owe her a lot. We've been working on the natural assumption that my father planted back doors in the software programs. We assumed he used the main Internet connection."

  Ian McGillicuddy, a tall Irishman, raised his hand. "I'm not very good on a computer, Lily."

  She smiled at him. "Actually, Ian, don't feel alone. I use them on a daily basis, and it was Arly, our security expert, and eventually Flame who tracked this down. Flame? You want to explain to everyone what's going on? You're the one who finally figured it all out."

  Flame made a face and touched the cap on her head to make certain it was in place. Raoul Fontenot leaned over to bite her ear and whisper something that made her blush. She smacked him hard. "You're such a perv, Raoul."

  "Don't call me Raoul, Mrs. Fontenot," he whispered overly loud. "I told you, Gator. They have to call me Gator."

  "Don't you call me Mrs. Fontenot," she hissed between her teeth, the color creeping up her neck.

  "You married him," Ian pointed out with a wide grin.

  "I was tricked." Flame shoved at Gator to move him away from her, but he didn't appear to notice, not budging an inch.

  "The computers," Ryland reminded them.

  "Sorry," Flame muttered. "There's a single Internet line coming into the house, a high-speed cable modem. The cable line hooks up to the cable modem. The modem, in turn, hooks to a router, which then distributes the cable signal to all computers. In this case, Dr. Whitney used a high-end snazzy, heavy-duty router because he has so many computers. We presumed Whitney," she glanced at Lily, "or someone who knew about his work, tried to get access to his computers via the Internet connection, through the router. The router has a built-in firewall, as do each of the individual computers. We used the firewall software to monitor any attempted intrusions. There were random attempts here and there that you can expect to find on any computer these days. The attempts were easily rejected by the firewall and didn't have the kind of systematic pattern I would have expected to see if someone was trying to get in."

  "Arly and Flame monitored the computers for several days with no luck at all of spotting evidence of my father attempting to break in," Lily explained.

  Flame nodded. "We kept daily logs on each computer." She took the notebook Lily slid to her and opened it to a random page. "Here's the event log for the last week. There were several random attacks from different IPs on UDP port 25601, like this one on Thursday at 10:39:17 A.M. from IP address 152.105.92.65. Or this one on Friday at 5:23:58 A.M. from IP address 59.68.234.64. They were all caught and stopped by the firewall and were all probably SeriousSam gamers looking for playmates--you can tell the game by the port they were trying to enter through."

  Ian scratched his head. "Sheesh, Flame, and I thought Lily couldn't speak English."

  She smirked at him. "And you thought I was just a pretty face."

  "I thought you were a pain in the ass," he said. "Now I know you are. You're going to be holding this over my head, aren't you?"

  "Darn straight." Flame tossed the log on the table. "At a certain point we realized someone was reading the key files on Lily's computers. We found that out by noticing that the last accessed date on several files was very recent."

  "Wait." Ian held up his hand. "I'm really trying to follow this. How can you know when someone accessed a file?"

  "Every Windows file has three associated time stamps. Creation date, last modified date, and last accessed date. You can access or read a file without modifying it, hence the distinction between last accessed and last modified."

  "Okay, that makes sense," Ian said. "Did you catch him?"

  "I wish. We ramped up our monitoring of the firewalls, but we couldn't link any of the random attempts to the reading of the files. We looked in all the usual places someone could insert a back door into the Windows operating system, but couldn't find any evidence of any such back door. We were completely stumped."

  Lily laughed softly. "Arly and I were stumped. Flame suddenly jumped up and yelled, 'Hardware back door.' I had no idea what that meant, Ian, if that's any consolation."

  Flame shrugged. "It was so obvious. We forgot the most obvious advantage Dr. Whitney had over other hackers. These are his computers. He could do anything he wanted with them. Unlike the usual hacker, he doesn't have to sneak a virus, worm, or Trojan through the firewalls. Unlike software manufacturers, he doesn't have to sell someone software with a back door in it. No, he has complete control over his own computers. He could literally drill a hole in the side of his computer and run a cable into it creating a private tap. All that time we wasted looking for a software back door when it had to be a hardware back door."

  "Then she went a little crazy," Lily explained.

  "A lot crazy. I just knew I was right, and for once we were going to have the opportunity to the turn the tables on Whitney," Flame admitted.

  "She was crawling around all the computers in the laboratory, picking up wires and following the network of cables from one computer to another. Then she held up the router and started yelling, 'Look at this, look at this.' I had no idea what I was supposed to be looking at."

  Flame grinned at her. "It had one too many wires coming out of the box. I knew we had him by the--" She broke off. "I knew we had him. The file protection system on these computers is set up on the local area network, or LAN, to be able to access the files on any other computer--and why not? They're all the doctor's computers--it would only be the doctor working on one computer and accessing another. We'd been looking for an intrusion from outside via the Internet. All the firewalls are protecting us from outside intrusions. Dr. Whitney is getting in by masquerading as an insider, as another computer on his own LAN. One of the lines was bogus, and I knew it would take us to the do
ctor. I traced the line straight to a wall."

  "This is where we get a little technical," Lily said.

  "Not too," Flame assured Ian. "We discovered the network cable is hooked via a CSU/DSU box into what we realized is a leased T3 line. And before you ask, a CSU/DSU box is a channel service unit/data service unit or digital service unit box, and that's what identifies the fact that it is a leased line. This is a superfast dedicated connection across the phone lines. The DSU connects to the LAN inside the house and the CSU connects to the lease line."

  Ian frowned and glanced around the room. "I don't get this. The line goes through the wall and goes to a leased line? He rents a line?"

  "A leased line is actually composed of three parts," Flame explained. "Two local loops and a long haul. The first local loop runs from this house to the nearest POP, which basically is point of presence of the long distance carrier or carriers. There has to be a similar local loop running from wherever the doctor is currently to the POP nearest him. The long distance carriers, one or more, use the normal phone lines to connect the two local loops. The fact that two local loops are completely private, plus special equipment on the hardware/software long haul, guarantees the entire connection is private."

  "So he has to be in the country," Ian said.

  "Not necessarily," Flame replied.

  "There have to be records of who leased the line," Kadan pointed out.

  "Of course. Dahlia broke in and looked for us. It wasn't very shocking to discover that an import company in Oregon, one owning a private jet by the way, a jet able to land in restricted military space all over the world, leased that line," Lily said. "Shockingly enough, the man who signed for the purchase of the private jet also signed for the purchase of the one that went down in the Congo. That man doesn't have a Social Security number or birth certificate that we could find."