AK,
Leadville.
You won’t see me, but I’ll see you.
GF
Pumping a fist into the air, Kurtzman yelled, “Yes! Sleep can wait. We have contact.”
AN HOUR LATER, Kurtzman was seated inside a Stony Man Farm’s Lear jet specifically designed to accommodate his wheelchair. Accompanying him were four of the finest warriors he knew. Pilot Jack Grimaldi was seated in front, finishing last-minute preparations for takeoff, and seated around the cabin was the trio known as Able Team—Carl “Ironman” Lyons, Rosario “Politician” Blancanales and Hermann “Gadgets” Schwarz.
Whatever fatigue Kurtzman had felt previously had vanished with the arrival of Fox’s message. Though his eyes still ached from lack of sleep and his trademark bad coffee was causing his stomach to roil, his mind was more alert than it had been for at least twenty-four hours, and for that he was grateful.
It was heading into late evening and Blancanales let loose with a big yawn.
Kurtzman held up a stainless-steel thermos. “Coffee?” he offered.
Blancanales waved him off. “Save it, amigo,” he said. “Just in case the plane runs out of fuel.”
“I didn’t make it,” Kurtzman lied.
“Well, in that case.”
Kurtzman poured the coffee into three foam cups and handed them out. “You girls are going to be needing this,” he said.
“Sounds ominous,” Blancanales said. Swigging down some of his coffee, he made a face. He looked at Kurtzman, flashing a knowing smile.
“It’s always ominous,” Lyons said, an edge in his voice. “Why you dragging me—us—out in the middle of the night like this?”
“Simple snatch-and-grab mission,” Kurtzman replied. Reaching into a pocket on the side of his wheelchair, he extracted three mission packets, handed them to Schwarz who was seated across from him, who, in turn, distributed them to the others. The plane had been configured for briefings, with four of the cabin seats facing one another.
“Before we leave the plane,” Kurtzman said, “I need to take back these dossiers and put them in a burn bag. None of this stuff is supposed to leave the airplane, so commit the photo to memory.”
Schwarz held out the photo so that it was visible to the others. “Kind of hard to forget a mug like this,” he said. “He’s a hard-looking kid. He the target?”
Kurtzman nodded. “In a manner of speaking, though he’s on our side, all appearances aside. Name’s Gabe Fox and he’s a computer genius.” Kurtzman brought the others up to date on the recent kidnapping attempts on Fox, the murder of his wife, how he’d gone underground and contacted Kurtzman less than two hours ago.
Blancanales was leafing through the file on his lap. “He’s what, twenty-three years old? What makes him so special that everyone and their brother’s trying to hunt him down?”
“It’s not Gabe, per se, they’re after,” Kurtzman said. “It’s what he’s created. A little bit of background. He works for the CIA’s counterterrorism unit. He’s not a field operative. He’s strictly a lab guy. Like I said, he’s a maestro at the computer, and we’re lucky to have him on our side. He’s created some downright scary computer viruses and worms. Stuff capable of shutting down electrical grids or air-traffic-control systems. Remember all the Y2K doomsday scenarios with airplanes falling from the sky and all that crap? Forget it. This kid can program that stuff in his sleep.”
“So someone wants him for his brain power?” Schwarz offered.
“Sort of,” Kurtzman replied. “He’s created a computer worm called Cold Earth. The thing’s capable of shutting down the cooling systems in nuclear reactors, then frying the computers so that they’ll do nothing but crash repeatedly. If you’re working at a nuclear power plant and the computers go blooey, what would you do?”
“Soil myself,” Schwarz said.
“After that,” Kurtzman said, smiling.
“Try to restart the system,” he replied. “See if I could get the cooling system to kick back on.”
“Right. Thing is, though, every time you do that, the worm changes the computer’s password. So you just sit there restarting the damn thing while the reactor core overheats.”
“Wow,” Schwarz said.
“Yeah, wow. Pretty soon, you have a meltdown like nothing the world’s ever seen. You multiply that by every nuclear reactor around the country, hell, around the world, and you’ve got Armageddon a hundred or so times over.”
“Okay, fine,” Lyons said, “so this little lab rat comes up with this thing. Surely he came up with a way to counteract it.”
“He’s working on it,” Kurtzman said.
Lyons’s face reddened, and Kurtzman knew the former Los Angeles cop was having a meltdown of his own. “Working on it? What the hell? If he’s ‘working on it,’ then he ought to be sitting on his rusty can in a basement at Langley. Not skulking around the damn Rocky Mountains.”
“That’s why we’re going after him, Carl,” Kurtzman said.
“That’s not what I meant. What I meant was, why wasn’t this guy under heavier lock and key? Shit, if it was me, I’d stick him in the Situation Room in the White House’s basement, cordon the place off with Delta Force troopers and not let him out until he came up with a way to counteract this thing.”
Kurtzman nodded. “Agreed. Unfortunately someone at Langley was more focused on playing ‘cover your ass,’ rather than doing his or her job. According to the background information Barb and I were able to piece together, someone in Virginia didn’t want the White House to know there was trouble.”
“So they handled it ‘in-house,’ so to speak,” Blancanales said.
“Yeah, they handled it, all right,” Lyons said. “Let the toilet overflow, and guess who has to handle the mop-up.”
“Eloquent,” Schwarz said.
“He’s right, though,” Kurtzman interjected. “Apparently someone, or several people within the Agency, for that matter, knew about Gabe’s problem. They also knew that someone was acting as a mole, handing out information about his latest creation. But they kept trying to handle it themselves, rather than go to the President or someone else for help.”
“The big questions are, who sold him out and who’s trying to kidnap him?” Blancanales said. “We have anyone covering that angle?”
Kurtzman nodded. “Hal’s working on it. As soon as word went out about the whole situation, he hopped a plane to Wonderland. I guess the National Security Council’s still getting up to speed and debating whether to yank this from the Agency.”
Blancanales scowled. “Doesn’t seem like there ought to be a hell of a lot to debate here.”
“More politics,” Kurtzman said, sighing. “In the meantime, we’re heading to Leadville, Colorado, to hunt for Gabe. Or more precisely, we’re going there so he can find us. There’s a municipal airport in Dillon. From there, it’s about an hour or so’s drive to find him. He knows me and will be looking for me. That’s the reason I’m going along on this mission. Plus, Barb and Hal figured my computer expertise might help. I may draft Gadgets, too, before it’s all over.”
Schwarz nodded. “What then?” he asked.
“Carl, you and Pol need to form a human cordon around him. Gadgets and I will work with him on trying to counteract this thing.”
“If we’re that worried about losing him,” Blancanales countered, “why not haul him back to Stony Man Farm? No one would find him