Borderless Deceit by Adrian de Hoog

up the stairs he recounted what he once read.
    So he knew for certain that, no, Carson never lived anyplace other than here, and his wife grew up next door.
    â€œKinky.”
    More facts acquired by the snuffling bear: Carson joining the Service and showing dedication; Carson, still young, deciphering the Warsaw Pact’s fall-back strategy in the event of a major conventional military confrontation in central Europe; Carson figuring out the intended deployment by the Soviets of an improved sonar net in the North Atlantic; Carson studying decrypted Soviet data and concluding they had discovered the holes in NORAD’s radar cover over the high Arctic (useful for a surprise Deep Strike); Carson’s work standing up to all cross-examination; Carson causing the Yanks to be hellishly impressed.
    â€œCool.”
    More facts still. Post Cold War. Volumes of incisive work on links between the politicians, the financiers and the traders of embargoed arms. Deep down, the snuffler knows he’s overdoing this. He should be more prudent and say less. But the addiction to spinning yarns trumps restraint and if anything the speed picks up. Carson’s attitude pissing most everyone off; Carson becoming untouchable because, by popular demand from below the 49th parallel, he’s named keeper of a certain gate, whereby coordination of the intelligence relationship with the Americans falls into his lap. And what happens next? The intelligence genius gets to be so full of himself that he looks down on all and sundry as useless and inferior beings.
    â€œHow someone that smart,” the Czar concluded, “gets life that ass backwards is beyond me.”
    â€œGothic.”
    The stair climbing was getting the better of Heywood. He was stopping frequently to wheeze, allowing Jaime’s thoughts to go back a bit. How had the glowering eyes in the far corner seen her? Or intoher? As someone inferior? As competition? Or as an outcast like himself? Was there a game in that? Maybe one day they would play it. No problem thinking of a name: Cloven Hoof and Fallen Angel.
    The Czar and his young acolyte finally stood before a thick steel door. But even as Jaime punched numbers into a wall pad and an electronic lock clicked and the entrance to her new domain gave way, she continued thinking of the infernal countenance at the back. Only when a switch was flipped and a great cavern sprung to life did the brooding analyst’s image fade.
    Jaime never imagined that one day she’d have a place like it. Sure, it was an overnight job that got a bit rushed. Yet it was mostly finished. Enormous computing power had been assembled in record time and only she had access. “Come clean, Irv, who’d you bribe?”
    The Czar shrugged.
Carte blanche
.
    Now
he
had questions. What was the plan? What happened next? “Keep it simple,” he muttered. “On matters of technology I’m quickly out of my depth.”
    The first line of attack – as the Czar understood Jaime – would be thus:
    The bug had been sophisticated and so had to have been big, a wallop of a program. Somewhere in the network a burst of data would have entered and the perturbation should have registered. Such back-up processes as might by chance have been running that moment would have stored at least part of it, that is, before the servers began self-destructing. Jaime planned to copy the back-up tapes into her flashy new computers. That might take a day. A comparison of the time-lines of digital peaks on different tapes, even with millisecond intervals, might indicate where the virus showed up first. “So we could find out which server the bug used to get in. It won’t tell us much, but it’ll be a start.”
    The Czar nodded. “We gotta know that. Makes sense. If there’s a burglary you want to know where the thief came in. The virus was monstrous, am I right, Jaime?”
    â€œThere’s one great hacker out there