Hot Intent. Cindy Dees

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.”

      He grabbed a jacket and headed out of the condo. Time to get the hell away from his home and his family to continue this search. He headed for an internet café, but not just any café. The Flaming Frog catered to hackers specifically. The firewalls and other protections in the café made its systems nearly impossible to trace. And even if a hack was traced, the café kept no records of who’d sat at which terminal. The FBI and NSA hated the place, but so far had failed to shut it down despite repeated visits to local courts on various trumped-up charges.

      “Hey, dude. Haven’t seen you in a while.” The night manager waved cheerfully at him. Store policy: no names got used. Ever. He waved back at the girl, who looked about twelve but was probably closer to thirty. She was also a top-notch hacker.

      “Hey, Blondie,” he murmured across the counter. “Feel like taking on one of the big boys?”

      “Sure.