Hot Intent

“Have you never had a warm chocolate chip cookie fresh out of the oven before?” she demanded.

“Never. My father and I didn’t cook.”

“You poor, deprived man!”

She stood on tiptoe to plant a chocolate-flavored kiss on his mouth. She smelled of vanilla and joy. What must it have been like to grow up in her family? A blade of jealousy sliced into his heart for an instant. “I have some work to do. If you could take the baby...”

“Of course.” She scooped Dawn out of his arms. “What kind of work?”

“The kind I can’t talk about.”

Her bright blue eyes clouded over, but to her credit, she didn’t pry. He’d explained to her that he was accustomed to secrecy and that she couldn’t expect him to share every aspect of his life with her all the time. But he felt bad as he retreated to his office. What the hell was she doing to him? Since when did he want to spill every detail of his existence with anyone?

Furthermore, since when did he have feelings toward any other human being? His father had taught him well that feelings were the greatest weakness any spy could fall prey to. God knew, the past year of CIA training had only reinforced that message.

He’d thought he’d purged all deep feelings from his heart in that CIA training facility. But apparently not. Dammit. He had to find a way to isolate and contain these warm feelings he was having toward Katie.

Setting aside the problem of Katie McCloud, he locked himself in his office and got to work.

Mentally shaking his head, he broke into D.U.’s personnel files with a few casual keystrokes. Actually, it wasn’t that easy. He’d worked for months in jail developing and perfecting the decryption algorithm he used today.

He printed a hard copy of the entire employee roster of Doctors Unlimited and went to work. Financials were the easiest place to spot a turned spy. Mounting debt, illicit spending on a personal vice, an illness in the family—all the symptoms of a spy vulnerable to bribery or coercion—showed up most readily on bank statements. So, that was where he concentrated his search. He figured André would have done a thorough job vetting his people’s distant past and extended families, so he skipped looking at personal histories for now.

But after an entire afternoon of work and nearly a dozen of Katie’s irresistible cookies, nobody was leaping out at him as a candidate to be his father’s mole. Frowning, he went for a stroll around the terrace garden that had been his father’s pride and joy. He had to admit, Peter had a good eye for texture and color. The contrast of the stark cacti with softer, greener plant material was striking.

Contrast.

Maybe he’d been looking for the wrong thing. He’d been looking for a big change in someone’s spending habits. Instead, maybe he ought to be looking for a long-term pattern of expenditures that, in comparison to other D.U. employees, contrasted with the other people’s in the organization.

He went back to his computer to run a position-by-position spending comparison on D.U.’s staff. But that, too, turned up nothing.

Katie brought him a salad at some point and he ate it absently. Food had been optional often in the past year and was not something that held his attention anymore.

It grew dark outside, and he continued to poke and prod at the D.U. staff. But no matter how he examined them, nobody stood out as a mole. Which meant one of two things. Either there was no mole and his father was bluffing, or the mole was very, very good. He strongly suspected the latter was the case.

He leaned back frowning. If he were infiltrating Doctors Unlimited, how would he go about it? The aid organization placed physicians and nurses around the world in dangerous hot spots where regular aid organizations refused to send their people. The staff of D.U. was dedicated, passionate and a little crazy. Money wouldn’t be high on their personal priority lists. Ideals would be, though.

He ran a quick search of political affiliations. And that was when he got a hit. Dmitri Churzov. D.U.’s I.T. guy—responsible not only for its in-house computers, but also the all-important interface with the CIA’s computers—had been flagged by the FBI for attending several Communist Party rallies in college. Alex winced. God, it was so cliché. The kid even had a Russian name.

He frowned. In point of fact, the guy was a little too cliché. His father was emphatically not the type to recruit so obvious a target. Were he Peter, Dmitri would be the one guy he would not recruit to work for the FSB.

Decisively, Alex crossed Dmitri off his list of suspects. Who, then? The problem with an organization like Doctors Unlimited was that it used its legitimate work to passively collect intelligence on the side. André reported what his people observed. Nothing more. It wasn’t like anyone at D.U. besides André would know about, let alone get involved with, any high-profile, active ops. Why would anybody bother to infiltrate such a low-level group? Especially with a live mole who would be expensive to recruit and compensate, and who would be high maintenance to run?

André had allowed that the mole could be someone who merely interacted with D.U. at CIA headquarters. Maybe that was where his father’s mole was placed.

The agency’s computers would be significantly more difficult for Alex to hack than the D.U. system, particularly if he didn’t want to cause all sorts of alarms to go off and a black ops team to show up at his door. But it was by no means impossible.

Rather than make a direct attack, he instead went after André’s home computer. It took him nearly an hour, but eventually he lifted most of his boss’s passwords from his other accounts. Armed with those, Alex attempted a straight-up log-in to the CIA’s system as if he were André himself.

Tsk. Tsk. The same password that logged the guy into his daughter’s school grades got Alex into the CIA mainframe.

He unashamedly browsed his boss’s correspondence with his CIA superiors. If he’d once had any sense of ethics and morals about privacy, they’d been stripped out of him this past year.

It was mostly desultory reports and the occasional debrief on a concluded overseas mission by one of the D.U. medical teams. Even the intelligence reports were predictable, though. Troop emplacements, supply routes, casualty numbers, the usual stuff. But then a phrase jumped out at him.

Cold Intent. Major intelligence and military operations were given two-word names, a random adjective/noun combination. Some of them became well-known: Rolling Thunder. Desert Storm.

What major op could an unassuming, passive intel collection outfit like Doctors Unlimited be involved in?

The whole message read, Cold Intent is on track. The asset is in place and unaware. It was dated right about the time he and Katie were sent overseas last year.

He stared at the words on his screen with foreboding. The asset is in place and unaware. Unaware of what? What asset? Why did he get a sick feeling in his gut that the message had something to do with him?

Cold Intent. He typed the phrase into the CIA search engine. Immediately, a screen popped up announcing that André did not have access to that information. If it was above André’s pay grade, then why was the man aware of it and referring to it in a message?

Frowning, Alex turned his attention to the recipient of the message. There was no name, merely a series of random numbers and letters belonging to an IP address—a location designated somewhere on the internet to receive messages without being attached to any one email account or identity.

He initiated a deep system trace on the location of the IP address. He might not be able to find out who the recipient was, but he could find out where the recipient was.

The message had bounced off seven of the thirteen nodes that all internet traffic passed through and his system was painstakingly searching back to an eighth node when everything went crazy. Attack warnings flashed on his screen. Automated notifications that his antihacking software had been activated flashed up. Lines of code scrolled too fast to read, and then his computer screen went blank. A silent, blue screen of doom glowed at him.

What the hell?

“Are you coming to bed soon?” Katie asked from the doorway.

He looked up, startled. To bed with her? So she could smash through his emotional defenses with the shocking ease she always did? A frisson of dismay whispered through him. “No. Go on without me.”

Social norms dictated that he should probably kiss her good-night or in some other way act affectionate and social. He really owed it to her to at least pretend normalcy, but he just couldn’t bring himself to do it. He felt bad about not being able to show her simple affection, but he just couldn’t. He really ought to be riveted on how his computer had just been shut down. And why.

Katie retreated silently, disappointment darkening her blue eyes, and he turned his attention back to his dead computer.

What—who—was Cold Intent? Why did the mere act of tracing an IP address send an attack at him that had triggered a tactical nuclear meltdown of his computer?

He was shocked at the amount of damage the attack had done to his normally intensely secure computer. He ended up more or less wiping out every file on the hard drive, restoring it to the factory defaults and starting over from scratch reloading and rebooting the entire system from his backup files.

He was still working hours later when he heard Dawn stirring in her room over the intercom and went in to rock her back to sleep. He sat down with her in the rocking chair in her room and let the deep peace of the night and her sweet baby smell pass over him. How could something so innocent exist in the evil world he knew it to be? How was he ever going to manage to keep her safe from it all? The weight of the responsibility pressed down on him until he struggled to breathe. He laid the sleeping baby in her crib and went back to work grimly.

He took a break to doze on the leather sofa in his office while some particularly large files uploaded. But he lurched awake as an alarm sounded abruptly. He raced over to his computer and was stunned to see a warning that one of his bank accounts had just recorded an attempted hack-in. He sat down and typed quickly, locking down the account and his other accounts while he was at it.

He’d barely finished before the phone on his desk rang. What the hell? It was 4:00 a.m.

“Go,” he snapped.

“Mr. Peters? This is Advanced Security Systems. I’m sorry to disturb you at this hour. But we’ve just gotten notification on our internet server that there has been an attempt to break in to your house’s alarm protocols. A note on your file said you wanted to be notified immediately of any such incidents.”

Sonofabitch. Who was coming after him like this? Surely, it had something to do with Cold Intent. “Thanks. Lock it down for now. I’ll be in touch in a few hours with further instructions.”

“Will do, sir.”