True Faith and Allegiance

Peng did not answer. Dalca felt himself relax a little. These guys were just here to put terror in the hearts of the Romanians, to warn them to be careful with the data. Sure, if Dalca had incriminated himself they would have upped their measures, but he’d given them nothing but assurances, so they would just threaten a bit more and leave. They might not be convinced the ISIS intel had not come from ARTD, but they would have no evidence to support the possibility.

Dalca pressed his luck. “If I might make a suggestion: The raw files are housed on a single air-gapped computer. As per your original request, there are no copies, and the files have not been uploaded so that they can be pulled by multiple machines. The machine holding the data is here in the building. Once the data was uploaded onto the computer, it was erased from the transferring machine, and that hard drive was destroyed off-site so there would be no evidence of it. The machine holding the records has had all its external ports physically disabled. There is no way to upload or download to the machine. You can’t even print off records.

“If it would make you more comfortable, you can take the material with you, keep it safe, until all this in America blows over. Obviously it will mean the end of the work we do for the time being, but you would be sure that the data was not being misused.”

Dragomir Vasilescu was confused by the odd suggestion by Dalca, but in truth it was an empty suggestion. These guys didn’t want to touch the material on that computer, and Dalca knew it. Other than the conclusions made by ARTD and then sent on to them, they wouldn’t go near it.

Peng just shook his head, as Dalca had suspected he would all along.

Now Peng and his three henchmen looked menacingly at Vasilescu. “We have people in our technical research division who will study what happened to the Americans. If we find any connection between your breach of their network via India and the new threats taking place in the United States right now, we will be back, and we will hold you responsible.”

The men from the Seychelles Group left twenty minutes later.

Dragomir Vasilescu turned to Alexandru Dalca in the lobby as soon as they were gone. “Those guys are lunatics. They think we are working with fucking terrorists.”

Dalca agreed, then added, “That stuff happening in America isn’t coming from the data Albert stole. That’s insane.”

Now Dragomir looked at his lead researcher with a cocked head. “Hey… what was that back in there? You usually aren’t so quick to pass off praise to your team. That showed maturity.”

Dalca smiled. “Just wanted the Seychelles Group guys to know there are others involved.” He winked. “I think it’s only fair.”

Back in his office, Dalca poured himself a cup of coffee and sat down at his desk. He felt a little light-headed, and he wondered if he was coming down with a cold. As he reached for his coffee cup, he knocked the liquid over his table. He leapt up, cursed in surprise and anger, and then headed out to the break room on his floor to get some towels.

Keep it together, everything is great, he told himself. He was as chill as a person could be, he told himself this with finality every day. But now as he rushed to get something to clean up his mess, he looked down at his hands and he saw them shaking.

He could convince anyone of anything, but right now his mind could not convince his body that he was, in any way, safe.

Peng and his men were looking hard for evidence that ARTD had helped ISIS, and Dalca was in the middle. He’d sent them away for now, but they weren’t going very far away.

Somewhere behind his calm façade he knew they would come back.

45

At 6:53 a.m., sixty-one law enforcement officers from various local and state authorities surrounded the Fresh Fest supermarket on West Ann Road in Las Vegas, Nevada. Two ambulances had already made the scene and left, their sirens wailing as they raced off to hospitals. But even now two more ambulances sat parked behind the police cars while EMTs and paramedics treated three lightly wounded civilians in the parking lot.

Forty minutes earlier, an Air Force Reaper unmanned aerial vehicle pilot had stopped in to pick up groceries on his way home from a twenty-four-hour shift at Creech AFB, northwest of the city. He’d been walking up to the checkout counter when he noticed a young olive-skinned couple next to him fidgeting nervously, glancing his way. The major was uneasy enough to walk over to a self-checkout lane, and when he looked back up at the couple he realized they were moving his way. The woman reached into her purse, and the man reached under his shirt.

As the guns came out and the major dropped his groceries, he heard a shouted command from up the magazine aisle. There, an older man in a baseball cap had drawn a small stainless steel pistol. He held it on the couple and ordered them to drop their weapons, but both of them instead turned to him and opened fire.