The Paris Betrayal by James Hannibal (beach read .TXT) 📕

typed, Dylan chattered on. “You know. Accusing me of killing Giselle was bad enough. But when you insist on your innocence in the face of this severance, the accusation you’re making is far worse.”

Ben didn’t follow. Maybe the disease had dulled his mind. “Explain.”

“Your declaration of innocence is a declaration that the Director is dealing falsely with you—his agent. You’re calling him faithless, thus proving yourself to be the same.”

Faith. That word again. “I am not faithless.”

“Really?” Dylan blew on the drive’s connector and plugged it into his machine. “Let me put this into geek speak for you.”

“Because that’ll help.”

“It will. I promise.” A window appeared on the left monitor—green computer code on a black screen. “I’m running a program to dig through the formatting data on your drive and look for hidden files. I’m mining for raw data. Ones and zeros, when you get down to the heart of things.”

“Binary,” Ben said.

“Correct. In geek terms, a thing is either a one or a zero. Either it is, or it isn’t. Our boss, the Director, is either the good guy we all follow, or he isn’t. We work on faith that he is.” Another window came up, symbols instead of code. Dylan squinted at the screen, as if he hadn’t expected to find it, but he finished his argument. “By declaring your severance unjust, you’re accusing the boss of being a bad guy, a zero. If that’s not being faithless, I don’t know what is.”

Ben opened his mouth to argue.

Dylan held up a hand to stop him. “Hang on. I found something.” He tapped the enter key. A whole series of files came up—lists of numbers and three-dimensional drawings of docks and piers. “Whoa. What do we have here?”

They both leaned in. “I think those are coordinates,” Ben said.

Dylan clicked through the files. “And these look like 3D radar and sonar returns. I think I know what this is, and it’s definitely not a virus.”

A roll of a trackball moved the files over to Dylan’s main screen. He dumped them all into a program he grabbed from the ONR site and waited. A time bar counted down. A single window opened. A digital ship sailed through a three-dimensional harbor, viewed from the waterline, with every obstacle above and below the surface visible.

Dylan rotated the image to a top-down view. The ship followed a red line through the water, heading for a pier. “This is navigational data for docking a large vessel.”

“Like an autopilot?”

“More like an auto–harbor pilot. GPS isn’t enough to safely dock a ship. But having the radar and sonar profile for the entire harbor gives a ship with the right propulsion system nanometer precision. Cargo companies use it to avoid paying for a human harbor pilot. They can just come in on their own. It’s totally legal at a lot of ports.”

“So, you’ve gotta ask yourself why,” Ben said. “Why did Sea Titan hide this totally legal data on the thumb drive?”

Dylan didn’t answer.

Ben nodded at the screen. “What harbor is this?”

“How should I know? There are no names.”

“You have the coordinates in front of you.”

“Oh. Right.” Dylan fed the last coordinate into the ONR’s tracking program, and the map jumped to a cargo pier in Baltimore harbor labeled SEAGIRT MARINE TERMINAL.

“Houston, we have a target.” Ben fell back in his chair. His body ached, as if prodding the genius had sapped the same amount of energy as running a marathon. “Okay. I’m assuming the ONR tracker can show us the schedule for Seagirt Terminal. Show me the bookings for the next couple of days.”

“Whatever you say, boss.” Dylan tapped a few more keys, speaking in a voice that said I’m humoring you, boomer. “But if the Behemoth is in dry dock or even pretending to be in dry dock, it won’t show up.”

“No. It won’t.” Ben sat forward again, watching Dylan scroll through the list. “Stop. There.”

The cursor hovered over a slot allocated to a Jaspen ship. The Clementine. “That’s why the registration papers for another ship were in the envelope.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Run your ONR tracking program on the Clementine. The Behemoth is coming in under a different name.”

Dylan typed Clementine into the search bar. “Like they’re planning to repaint the ship enroute?”

“I wouldn’t put it past them.”

As before, the search came up empty, showing only the ship’s scheduled arrival in Baltimore for a slot before sunrise on the day after next. The ONR tracker showed no trace of the Clementine on the water. If Jaspen Cargo even owned a ship named Clementine, Leviathan had wiped her digital signature from the face of the earth.

Dylan ran the search three times. “This has to be a glitch.”

“What happened to all your certainty, kid?” Ben laughed, coughing and groaning as he did. “You’ve got a missing ship. Either the Clementine scheduled to arrive at Seagirt Terminal exists, or it doesn’t. A one or a zero. But you can’t say which. How do you like your binary theory now?”

65

The Haitian cab driver who picked Ben up outside the 7-Eleven a half mile south of Shady Oak didn’t seem to mind his hunched stance or sickly complexion. Maybe he picked up strung-out addicts at that corner all the time. He worked in the DC area, after all.

Cabbies use cameras and share info with other drivers—occasionally with the cops. Long walks and public transportation are the safest plan for a fugitive spy in the cold, but Ben no longer had the energy. His aches had doubled since his arrival at Dylan’s place. His muscles had lost half their strength. He’d have the cabbie drive him to a strip mall a couple of blocks from the motel.

“Take me to the pharmacy off Lukens Lane in Mount Vernon.” He kept his hood up as he dropped into the back seat. Dylan had pointed out new plague blotches on Ben’s arms and neck, and he wanted to keep the marks covered. The hood helped with his chills too. Mostly. Ben