The black cube
What laptop?” said Swagger.
“He’s being coy,” said Cohen. “It’ll play so well when Spielberg films it.”
“What laptop?” said Swagger.
“Sergeant Swagger,” said the Director, speaking to him directly for the first time, “you graciously visited Hell on our behalf and did not come out empty-handed. If we had the time, I’d give you a medal. But as you’re about to learn, we don’t have the time.”
The Director lifted his briefcase from the floor, opened it, and took out a plastic bag holding a curled and blackened laptop computer. Someone had put a burst through its screen, turning it into a spiral nebulae of fractures surrounding large holes that showed clean through. The keyboard had modulated into a wave, and most of its keys were shapeless nubs.
“Do you remember?” asked Cohen. “Gas and flame, your arm on fire, your Uzi too hot to hold. Somehow you reached out and snagged it, and, in another second, another jug of powder went, and then all of them. Somehow—God favors the insane perhaps?—you grabbed ahold, staggered out, and collapsed.”
“Wish I’d done that,” said Bob. “It seems pretty cool. Also, by the way, I tripped over a gun case with the initials A.W. on it, the third letter gone to fire.”
“It’s all coming back?”
“The only thing that comes back is that fire is hot, and you don’t want to die that way.”
“An excellent lesson,” said Cohen.
“Cohen might know a bit about this one subject,” said Gold. “He was shot down four times.”
Cohen held up his left hand. It was plastic.
“Okay,” said Bob. “I’m impressed.”
“He shot down fifteen of theirs. Net gain for our side: eleven aircraft.”
“Triple ace,” said Swagger. “Again, I’m impressed.”
“Odd that he turned out so annoying,” said Gold.
Bob nodded. “Anyway, that thing looks pretty well shot to hell to me.”
“Forensic computer science is quite advanced,” said Gold, “and we have people who are practiced at it.”
“You got something?”
“There was an undamaged sector header on the otherwise quite useless hard drive. The process is called file carving. Our people were able to extract bits of information from the header, including IP addresses recorded on the data sector. The data sector was gone, the data, therefore, was gone, but not the Internet Protocol addresses. They came from a server in Manila, in the Philippines. We’ve just penetrated it remotely, located the origin of the IPs, and learned that many were created in Dearborn, Michigan.”
A silence settled into the room.
Finally, it was the Director who spoke.
“That is why, Sergeant Swagger, in one hour you and Mr. Gold are taking off for Washington. Your FBI shares our concern. The evidence is irrefutable. Juba the Sniper is headed to America. He is going to shoot a high-value target from a long way away. And probably quite soon.”