CIA HEADQUARTERS
LANGLEY, VIRGINIA
USA
THERE was a quiet knock on the door and Irene Kennedy looked up to see one of her assistants poke his head in.
“Marcus Dumond would like to see you, Dr. Kennedy. He says it’s urgent.”
She felt her eyebrows rise involuntarily. Dumond was a young hacker whom Mitch Rapp had stumbled over a few years ago. He’d been on his way to jail when they’d provided him another option: give working for the Agency a try. The combination of gratitude and genius had turned out to be a good one and Dumond had become a critical part of her team. Having said that, he was easily intimidated and a bit of a recluse. In fact, she was having a hard time remembering an instance of him requesting a face-to-face meeting.
“How am I looking for the next fifteen minutes?”
“We can juggle.”
“Then tell him to come up.”
“Actually, he’s standing in front of my desk.”
“Really?” Kennedy said, even more surprised. “Then by all means send him in.”
Dumond entered a moment later, looking a bit haggard for his thirty-four years. Other than that, he didn’t seem much different than the day they’d first met—same thin frame, slightly crooked Afro, and vaguely stunned expression. He seemed perpetually unable to believe that he was working a high-level CIA job and not in a prison laundry.
“What can I do for you, Marcus?”
“There’s been an incursion into our system,” he said, a little breathlessly.
“From the outside?”
He shook his head. “Inside.”
“How far were they able to penetrate?”
“That’s what’s weird. They seemed to be after one very specific thing. Information on Nicholas Ward.”
“Ward?” she said, reflecting for a moment on how often the man had come up in her life over the past few weeks. “I wouldn’t think we’d have much sensitive intelligence on him.”
“We don’t. What little’s classified is classified at a low level. The truth is that you could dig most of it up from Wikipedia and old magazine articles.”
“If it wasn’t particularly critical information, why do you look so worried?”
“It’s not what the person was after, it’s how they did it. Whoever they were, they have a lot of clearance and a lot of brains.”
“But not so much of either that you didn’t discover them.”
He didn’t respond, looking even more concerned.
“Marcus?”
“The only reason I caught it is because I was running an unannounced diagnostic when the query came in,” he blurted. “I’m sorry, Dr. Kennedy. But it was just dumb luck. If I hadn’t been running it at that exact moment, they would have had pretty much full access to all our databases, and I would have never known anything about it. I’m really sor—”
She held up a hand, silencing him. In a way, Dumond was one of the most trustworthy people she worked with. He was brilliant, obsessive, and driven by motivations that were easy to decipher. Despite his history of draining corporate bank accounts that didn’t belong to him, he genuinely wanted to please her and do the right thing.
“If you wouldn’t have caught it, I’m confident no one else would have, either. Now, tell me this. Did this person get the information they were after?”
He shook his head. “All the files were off-line because of the diagnostic.”
“And I assume they still are?”
“Very off-line. I actually disconnected some hardware. You’d have to have a wrench and physical access to the server to get to them.”
“Now that we know what’s happening, can we track this person if they try again?”
“I doubt it,” he said uncomfortably. “The way the system’s designed—”
Again, she silenced him with a wave of the hand. What she didn’t need was an hours-long explanation of circuit boards and encryption algorithms.
“So, no.”
“That’s correct, ma’am. I can set things up so we know if there are any more attacks, but the way they’re being done makes it impossible to trace back to the person behind the keyboard.”
“You’re saying our system is just wide open to this person for the foreseeable future? That’s not acceptable.”
“No, ma’am. I can reprogram the system to shut them out, but it’s not going to be a smooth transition. Everyone at the Agency will get locked out and have to redo their log-ins.”
“Can I assume that our perpetrator will know we’re onto him or her if we do that?”
“Definitely.”
She leaned back and pondered the problem for a moment. “If we bring the system back online soon, am I correct in saying that it’ll just look like you’re finished with the diagnostic? That our mole would have no reason to be suspicious and would feel free to try again?”
“Yes. If we just go back online without a major security update, then, frankly, we can’t keep them out.”
“Can I make changes to Ward’s file before we go back online?”
“Absolutely,” he said, clearly following her thought process. If tracing this person electronically was impossible, there was another option. She could introduce subtle errors into the CIA’s information on Ward. Then, if those errors were acted upon, they might lead to the person who had so skillfully penetrated their defenses.
“Can you send me the files in question?”
He pulled a thumb drive from his pocket, having anticipated the request. “I can’t send them because they’re air-gapped. So, I put them on here.” After placing the storage device on her desk, he immediately started retreating toward the door. “I’m really, really sorry about this, Dr. Kennedy. Don’t worry, though. I’ll figure out a way to fix it. When you’re ready, just tell me, okay?”
She conjured up her warmest smile. Dumond didn’t do well under pressure and she needed him operating at one hundred percent. “I have complete confidence in you, Marcus. If anyone else had been at the helm, I doubt we would have ever known about this. So, thank you.”
His expression melted into something between a smile and a wince as he continued backing toward the door. “When you’re done making the changes, save them to that thumb drive and let me know. I’ll come get it and upload the files to the server. Sooner is better than later, though. The longer the system stays down—”
“You’ll have it by tonight.”
He turned to finish his escape but was forced to pause when she spoke again.
“Does anyone else know about this, Marcus?”
“No one.”
“Let’s keep it that way.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
After she’d finished skimming the CIA’s file on Nicholas Ward, Irene Kennedy took off her reading glasses and leaned back in her chair. She’d learned a few details she hadn’t known before but nothing that changed her opinion of the man.
There was no superlative that didn’t trivialize what he’d managed to accomplish in a single lifetime. The wealth was what everyone saw but it made up only a small part of who he really was. His motivations at this point appeared to be entirely altruistic. Clearly, he couldn’t be bought. He had no definable political or religious ideology. His only goal seemed to be to use the resources he’d accumulated to lift humanity out of the mire.
Unfortunately, it was those same resources that were making him an increasingly prominent target. For competing commercial interests. For politicians. Even for the people he wanted to help.
Ironically, it might be that latter category that would prove most dangerous in the long run. The average person had no hope of understanding the depths of someone like Nicholas Ward. His motivations. How a mind like his perceived the world. The effortlessness with which he manipulated the technologies he’d created. And what people didn’t understand they distrusted—a tendency that had been amplified a thousand times over by the Internet. It was getting hard to keep up with all the conspiracy theories that swirled around him. That he was using his medical research to track patients. That he was Q of the imaginary QAnon organization. Even that he was, in fact, some kind of lizard-human hybrid. The last one in particular would have been easy to laugh off if it weren’t for the startling number of people who subscribed to it. The belief in witches had been ridiculous, too, but that hadn’t been much comfort to the innocent people watching the flames rise around them.
Having said that, it would be very much a mistake to paint Ward as either innocent or a victim. Like the introduction to the old Star Trek television program, he was attempting to go where no man had gone before. There were risks to that kind of action. To him. And, frankly, to everyone else.
If she were to make a list of the most powerful entities in the world—the ones that would shape the next one hundred years of human existence—how would it be ordered? The United States and China would be on top, she imagined. But after that, was it possible that she’d write the name Nicholas Ward?
It was incredible that she was even asking that question. The first two entries encompassed the better part of two billion people. The last was a single man. A single man who still didn’t fully understand the power he had. One day he would, though, and she wasn’t sure what the consequences would be.
What she was sure of was that he needed to be protected. His involvement in telecom, space exploration, energy, and artificial intelligence was critical to America’s national security and economy. The rest of it—the existential danger and hope he represented—was something for another day.