Payback db-4 Page 2

  As was his custom, Túcume mangled the candidate’s name and his political affiliation: Victor Imberbe represented the Peruvian Centrists, and his moderate views were in no way left of center, let alone communist. In the past, this distortion had pleased Aznar, and he would jokingly add something of his own about one of the other candidates, Bartolo Lopez, who really was a communist. But today Aznar merely frowned.

  “Our polls,” he said. “We have barely twenty percent.”

  “And climbing,” said Túcume quickly. “It’s the direction that is important. Ortez has lost votes. They will go to you. Imberbe has barely forty percent. You are catching up.”

  “With this many candidates, the lead is insurmountable.”

  Not for the first time, Túcume wished that he could have run for the office himself. But the uniform had become a political liability in Peru, thanks to the criminal antics of some who had preceded him.

  “You are going in the right direction,” Túcume told his man firmly. “Continue to make your speeches. Do your work. We must all do our work.”

  The general glanced toward the knot of aides standing a respectful distance away. Among them were Aznar’s speechwriter — a mumbling Jew from Argentina who had somehow been gifted with a golden pen — and the candidate’s political adviser. Both were secretly on Túcume’s payroll. He called them over, pretending not to know them very well.

  “Geraldo, how are you?” he said to the speechwriter. “What are the high points of today’s speech?”

  “The poisoners of our country,” said the man, his beaky nose pointed almost straight down. “We must band together to fight them and seize the future.”

  “There, you see?” exclaimed Túcume. “What stronger argument can you make? The Maoist rebels are trying to steal our country.”

  “People don’t believe the rebels are a serious threat,” said Aznar glumly. “The cities are especially smug, even after the latest attacks.”

  “They will see,” said Túcume.

  Aznar stared at him, puzzled.

  Túcume grabbed the candidate’s arms, bracing him as if he were in the borderlands again, encouraging his men to chase the Ecuadorian scum.

  “Peru is counting on you. My people — our people — our ancestors, they are watching and helping you. Look around you; look at this—”

  Túcume turned Aznar 360 degrees, shaking his shoulders as he went.

  “This is our history and our destiny,” Túcume said. “Peru will be a great nation again. The others will stand up and respect us. Brazil, Argentina, the Ecuadorian dogs. Even El Norte, the demons of America, in the end they will respect us. No longer will we be considered the poor rabble of the world. Peru!”

  Túcume ended his speech by staring into Aznar’s face. The man had Quechua blood in him; his features made it obvious. But the European was there, too, diluting the courage that was necessary for greatness.

  “I will do my best,” said the candidate.

  “Your best will inspire the nation,” said Túcume. “Go.”

  5

  William Rubens pushed his chair back from the table as the waiter approached. As a general rule Rubens hated luncheons such as these, which he derisively termed chicken and pea affairs. The food was actually poached salmon and scalloped potatoes, but it could easily have been rubber as far as his taste buds were concerned. If that weren’t bad enough, he faced the unwelcome prospect of sitting through three long speeches on the “state of the world” by people who knew less about international affairs than Jay Leno did.

  Sensing his self-control slipping, Rubens rose and walked to the portable bar at the back of the room. He ordered a seltzer with a lime twist, then turned to survey the room silently.

  “I’d say, ‘A dollar for your thoughts, Bill,’ but you’d probably feel insulted.”

  “Debra.” Rubens turned and nodded at Debra Collins, the CIA deputy director of operations or DDO.

  “Charming lunch.”

  Collins’ tone would have sounded sincere to anyone who didn’t know her as well as Rubens did. Her rise in the CIA had been fueled by a healthy disdain of many of the people she worked for, contempt she kept well hidden. Under oath, Rubens would have admitted that she was smarter than most of the people she worked with and in her own way quite brilliant, especially when it came to manipulating people.

  He could speak from first-hand experience: they had been lovers for a brief time some years before. He still rued the mistake.

  “Thank you for your personal attention on Peru,” he said. “Your people were insightful.”

  “Of course,” she said. “How is that business?”

  “Proceeding.”

  “An interesting election.”

  “All elections are interesting.”

  “The president sees it as a comerstone of his South American policy. I hope it proceeds fairly.”

  “Yes,” said Rubens.

  The CIA had made several officers available for background briefings prior to the current Deep Black mission to Peru. It was a gesture of cooperation facilitated by the DDO, no doubt intended to show that Collins had no hard feelings about the mission, which had been authorized directly by the president and national security adviser. The complicated and delicate mission was precisely the sort Desk Three was invented to handle, but Rubens knew Collins felt that her people should have conducted it. Undoubtedly she saw it as yet one more instance of Deep Black encroaching on her agency’s domain. The CIA had made a strong play to “own” Desk Three when the high-tech covert group was first proposed, and Collins was nothing if not a sore loser.

  “Vice President Ortez is still running second, I see,” said Collins, sipping her drink — it would be a very weak vodka martini.

  “Yes,” said Rubens. “But the race is very close.”

  Much closer, in fact, than the polls showed — assuming the information Deep Black was working on was correct, Ortez was the one who was trying to steal the election.

  “Imberbe would be a good president,” said Collins. “Though I wouldn’t call him pro-American. Don’t you agree?”

  “I really don’t have an opinion,” he told her.

  “Oh, you always have an opinion, Bill. You’re just very careful about sharing it.”

  Touché, thought Rubens. But he refused to be provoked. “I would say that the problems in Peru are so intractable that any leader would have a difficult time. Ortez has always been anti-American, and he’s been much more vocal about it than the present president. As for Imberbe, he is a reasonably intelligent man. The fact that the company he owns had done much business with America is a plus, and his statements would certainly lead one to think he would be more in sync with us than most of the others. But who can see the future?”

  “Not you.”

  “Not I.”

  There was applause. The first speaker was ambling toward the podium.

  “If we can do anything more to help you, you’ll let us know,” said Collins.

  She tapped his shoulder gently. For just a moment, the shadow of what he had once felt for her crossed over him. It quickly lifted, but it left him confused and off-balance, un-characteristically paralyzed.

  He forced himself to nod graciously. He reminded himself that she was a viper. He told himself that she must have some ulterior motive, that nothing Debra Collins did was accidental, that surely she had been watching for her chance to accost him all through the lunch. By the time Rubens returned to his table, he was back in control, his feelings — misguided, surely — safety locked in a place where they could neither interfere with his judgment nor surprise him with their ferocity again.

  6

  “The vault room dates from the late nineteenth century,” said the Peruvian election official who met Lia and Fernandez at the bank. “It has survived several robbery attempts, including one by Yankee banditos. There are still scratches on the outside of the door from the dynamite when they tried to blow it up. The room here—” He swung around,
gesturing at the high-ceilinged lobby. “Mucho damage. Very severe. But not the vault. The gold remained safe.”

  “Tell her who the bandits were,” Fernandez prompted.

  “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. It is rumor, only.”

  A false one, Lia knew — it had been mentioned during her briefing. The western outlaws had spent time in Bolivia and elsewhere in Latin America, but they’d never come to Peru.

  Not to mention the fact that the safe had been built several years after they died. But it was a good story, and Lia saw no sense in interrupting the man as he fleshed it out with a legend about a local romance between Cassidy and the wife of the bank president. Feigning interest, Lia turned her real attention to the security setup, making sure it jibed with what she’d been told by the Art Room on the way over, as well as during her earlier briefing.

  The vault was a large steel and concrete encased room, partly underground, sealed by an impressively massive steel door. The room had its own level a few steps down from the lobby. There were two restrooms to the left along a narrow hallway and two equipment closets jammed with gear to the right. Surveillance cameras, both video and infrared, monitored the lobby and vault entrance. There were also motion detectors, but the system had been turned off because guards were now in the bank around the clock.

  Two stood just inside the main entrance. They were armed with MP5 submachine guns. Two more guards, also with submachine guns, stood along the rail above the vault floor. A final pair stood just outside the vault door. There were plainclothes guards at the foot of the steps from the lobby; they checked credentials of anyone entering the vault. A trio of Peruvian election officials assisted them and tried to look as important as possible.

  A reporter had come to the bank to do a story on the procedures that had been adopted to ensure a fair election, as well as some of the security surrounding the voting machines and related equipment. Though not allowed into the vault itself, he was being given a lecture near the security checkpoint by a carefully coiffured Peruvian government official, who assured him the special voter cards stored here guaranteed an honest result.

  “They must have done a dozen interviews here in the last week and a half,” Fernandez told Lia. “The cards and the vault have become symbols of the fairness of the election.”

  The official had a model of one of the cards in his hand, holding it out for the man to see. About half as big as a credit card, it looked like a Bic cigarette lighter that had been flattened by a cement mixer. A tapered end housed eight small tonguelike connectors, the slivers of metal looking a bit like flat piano keys. The indentations in the connectors added to the complexity of counterfeiting them.

  “This allows the vote to be recorded,” the official said in a sonorous voice. “No impostors.”

  He explained that there would only be three cards per voting place and that they had to be entered each time to record a vote. The cards included a chip that produced a 128-byte “key” that “unlocked” communications between two different parts of the system, which as a layman’s explanation of the security system was nearly as good as the considerably more technical brief Lia had received during the mission planning. Since the chips were custom designed and had been delivered only a week before, anyone interested in beating the encryption, let alone duplicating the cards, faced an almost insurmountable task.

  Unless the cards had been hacked before they were supplied. In that case, rather than guaranteeing a fair vote, the cards could be used to steal the election rather easily. Which was the reason Lia was here.

  Six days ago, an informant at the company that made the chips told the FBI that twelve cards had been engineered to guarantee that Ramon Ortez, the current vice president, would win. The informant had supplied a list of serial numbers for the chips used on the cards; the IDs were not written on the chips or the cards but could be obtained by querying them with a special reader.

  The hack was extremely sophisticated — so much so that it had taken the NSA’s experts nearly a day and a half to decide that it was conceptually possible and then design a way to test the cards, which were already in Peru.

  Making sure Peru’s elections were held had become a priority for the U.S. following several reversals for democracy in other South American countries over the past six months, including a coup in Brazil. But the fact that Ortez was known to be rabidly anti-U.S. complicated the situation, as did his intimate relation with the current government.

  The U.S. couldn’t announce that the cards had been hacked without being absolutely certain that they were. The hack had gone undetected by all of the earlier tests the monitors employed. Working undercover as a specialist brought in for a last-minute check, Lia would upload data from one of the cards so that the NSA specialists could determine whether it was indeed a clever hack or an even more clever hoax.

  The question was, what happened next? If the cards had been tampered with, simply revealing the hack might backfire. The company that had made the cards was American, and Ortez would surely claim that the U.S. had set him up. Public sentiment in the region was running heavily against the U.S., and it was very likely he’d be believed. Meanwhile, the UN election committee had indicated that if it detected fraud it would call for a delay in the election. That would also hand Ortez the presidency — the current president was very sick and had already indicated that, election or no, he would retire in a month. Ortez would assume the presidency and most likely cancel the election completely.

  Desk Three had been tasked with verifying that the cards had been hacked. If that proved to be the case, the NSA’s covert action team would then clandestinely replace the bad cards with good ones — assuming the U.S. president gave the final OK.

  The cards were stored temporarily in the large vault before being shipped to the regional election centers just before voters went to the polls. They were packed three to a tamper-evident envelope and stacked in narrow, shoe box-size boxes inside. Even though the envelopes could be identified by numbered bar codes on the outside, the odds against picking all twelve cards out of the thousands and thousands of envelopes were greater than one in 15 million.

  Fortunately, Deep Black had a way to beat the odds. The cards had been placed into the envelopes by a random sorting machine, ostensibly to further decrease the possibility of fraud, since no one on the production line would know where the cards were going. But like many supposedly random number generators, the sorting program was not really random. It used only two variables, and since the NSA analysts already knew one — it was a set permutation of the time the program was initiated — they could easily solve for the other. All they needed were the IDs of the cards in two envelopes; from that, they could map the entire collection. They would know where each card was without opening the envelopes. (Technically, they only needed the serial numbers from one card in one envelope to find the solution. But they would use two envelopes and test the full set to be sure.)

  Lia’s first priority today was to map the location of the cards in the envelopes. Then she would locate one of the suspect cards and swap it with the duplicate that had been fitted to the back of her belt buckle. The card would be taken out and tested; if it was hacked, the team would proceed to replace the rest of the cards. They had developed several different plans to do this and would choose the best depending on the specific circumstances at the time. Unlike many Deep Black missions, which involved weeks and even months of planning, the Peru operation had been mounted in only a few days. Its success — for Lia, there was no option other than success — depended to a large degree on the ability of the field ops to adapt to the situation.

  One option would be for Lia to return the next day to swap out the rest of the cards. Her cover gave her carte blanche to randomly test the cards as well as the machines, so she was guaranteed all the access she needed; all she had to do was wait for her opportunity. She could also opt to swap all twelve cards if the opportunity presented itself inside, using the complete set of twelve ca
rds hidden in the lining of the bag. Lia had suggested that option herself, arguing that it might prove simpler to simply replace all of the suspect cards on her first visit if she wasn’t being watched too carefully.

  The setup outside the vault argued that wasn’t likely. Even though she’d already passed through a metal detector and an explosive sniffer at the door, Lia had to run a similar gamut at the base of the steps leading down to the vault room. The sniffer could detect common explosives such as HMX and RDX, the major components in plastic explosives, as well as old standbys like nitroglycerin and TNT. Lia’s shoes, handbag, and briefcase were put through a separate X-ray machine and then hand-inspected, with each item in the bag and case closely examined.

  She watched as the detective laid out the items in the briefcase, beginning with the laptop and its related equipment. He checked the pages of her two bound marble composition notebooks, which were blank. He turned on her phone, which wouldn’t work because of the thick metal and concrete surrounding them. He even tested her pens. Finally satisfied, he handed the case back.

  “And my pocketbook,” said Lia.

  The man began to explain that unnecessary personal items were kept outside the safe.

  “I have female stuff in there,” she said sharply, first in Spanish, then in English. The man’s face turned red, and he quickly handed over the bag.

  It worked every time.

  Lia’s “female stuff ” amounted to two lipstick cases and a compact. She wasn’t likely to need the compact, which was actually a retina scanner, but the lipstick might come in handy — one shade concealed a solvent to unstick the bottom of the voter card envelopes without visible trace and the other a glue to reseal them. But what she really wanted were the voter cards. They’d been fitted precisely so that their outlines merged with the zipper and rivet design on the bag’s exterior and wouldn’t show up on the X-ray machine. The bag’s design was so elaborate that it had cost more to make than the cards it held.