38.

London, United Kingdom

On the large screen, the thumbnails of the different cameras disappear. Doc and Jay eye each other, disappointed. Phoenix has slipped away.

"Now you see why we need to keep looking?" Jeremy sighs. "Phoenix is like an eel. Most of his operation is mobile; he must have several hideouts ready to welcome him at the slightest doubt that Kinkaid is getting close to him."

Doc checks a few search windows that were running in the background on his system.

"Another one," he announces. "Joseph Stern, forty-three, a senior telecom technician for Verizon ... accredited to work on the SeaTac site ... a road accident, axle rupture, not common..."

"That makes two suspicious deaths in a very short time among personnel authorized to access the few data centers you identified."

"Not to mention the resignations of newly posted staff... It reeks of infiltration!"

"Unfortunately, this confirms our theory. Phoenix could potentially reach hundreds of millions of subscribers."

Doc turns away from his screen. "That gives him a pretty big address book. No doubt he can find some wealthy celebrities or people from the finance or political world."

"You're considering blackmail?" asks Jay.

"What else? He identifies a few high-ranking members, infuses his nanobots into their diet ... two migraines and a ransom demand later ... jackpot!"

Doc accompanies his words with the characteristic gesture of a player lowering a slot machine's arm.

"It's possible," Jeremy concedes warily. "And if Phoenix were only interested in money, that's probably what he'd do."

"But you believe there's something else?"

"He could have pursued his actions and quietly enriched himself by continuing to divert the use of Echelon for his benefit. I think this whole operation was concocted not only to strike a huge blow, demand a sizeable ransom, but also to ridicule the CIA and Echelon... He wants to prove he's the best, that his invention is viable."

"He could certainly pull out a list of dignitaries who would be at his mercy and request a payout directly from the CIA, I guess..."

"You're the global conspiracy and planetary threat theory specialist, right? Think bigger..."

Doc grimaces. "Bigger? We'd have to consider the mass dispersion of his nanobots in the food supply, and..." He suddenly stops before continuing in a worried tone. "Jay? Is there something you forgot to tell me?"

Jeremy seems to snap out of his reverie.

"Something's been bothering me for a while," he explains.

Doc is now hanging on his friend's every word.

"Vaughan was caught in France. He was employed there. How could an American without a work visa and speaking very poor French find a job so easily? I'm sure Phoenix had arranged this job in advance."

"Vaughan was a telecommunications specialist; he probably used him to compromise infrastructures in France."

"That would have been logical, yes, and I have no doubt that Vaughan is behind the design of the famous transponder needed to mask Echelon's signals. But infiltrating a data center takes time, Vaughan wouldn't have had the patience to play the good little employee. No, I reckon Phoenix shipped him to France for something else entirely."

"And what would that be?"

Jeremy doesn't directly answer Doc's question but continues to unravel his thoughts. "He sent him to Vergèze..."

"And where's that?"

"Somewhere in the south of France, near Nîmes. Far from all the major data centers, I believe," replies Jay. "Let's check..."

He opens an Internet browser and starts a search for the town's name. The official site appears at the top of the list. After a few links, he stops, perplexed.

"Damn! Just as I feared... Vergèze hosts one of the largest water bottling facilities in Europe."

"Oh, I've always said, Jay! Nestlé, Danone, Kraft, PepsiCo... The food monopoly, the four horsemen of the apocalypse, mass production, decreasing controls..."

"Doc?"

"What? Haven't I always said that those four would be the source of a global catastrophe?"

"That's not the point, Doc... Can you stop him?"

Doc looks hurt.

"Phoenix?" he asks. "Of course, I can stop him. Why do you think he's after me?"

Jeremy puts on a serious face before responding. "Do it."

Doc lets out a disapproving sigh.

"You know if I block him, we won't catch him, right?"

Jeremy clenches his jaw without adding anything.

"I mean," continues Doc. "He's already faked his death twice, disappeared from the radar, remained untraceable with a whole team of experts on his trail ... there's little chance we'll apprehend him..."

"I understand," Jeremy concedes. "But millions of lives could be at stake... I can't..."

"Listen, Jay," Doc interrupts seriously. "I am sure you want to catch him. And for my part, I won't sleep well knowing he's out there, somewhere. Look at the plan he devised ... and all for what? Revenge for losing his job! Can you imagine what he'll do to us if we thwart him?"

"Doc, the stakes are too high. We can't let him execute such blackmail. Kinkaid and his team will eventually catch him."

Doc nods.

"OK... No problem. It's not like it's my first incursion into the Echelon network."

Jay raises an eyebrow.

"How do you think I keep our communications secret?" states his friend.

"I see," Jeremy trails in a mockingly reproachful tone.

Doc clears his throat to draw Jeremy's attention.

"However," he adds. "If I patch Echelon, Phoenix will notice. What will stop him from continuing his blackmail on a smaller scale?"

"What do you mean?" worries Jay.

"He has the technology, the know-how, and if we assume his nanobots have already reached the food distribution... Without the global use of Echelon to relay his orders, he just needs to compromise a few cellular transmission towers, say in a metropolis like London, Paris, or New York."

"But that would still give him the potential to kill hundreds of thousands of people!" Jeremy objects.

Doc seizes the opportunity.

"Exactly! And we wouldn't be any closer to catching him, and I'd still be deprived of a good night's sleep knowing he's out of harm's way."

Jeremy smiles. "OK, and now that you've led the conversation precisely where you wanted, I guess you have a proposal?"

Doc rubs his hands and smiles back.

"We leave Echelon alone, Phoenix suspects nothing; meanwhile I arrange to block his signals directly at the mobile service providers. He has no visibility on that, as opposed to Echelon, which he probably knows like the back of his hand. We let him execute his blackmail, and when he touches his ransom, we track the money and ... surprise!"

Doc accompanies his sentence with a small jump punctuated by a cabaret dancer's jazz hands move. Jeremy nods, skeptical, as if unimpressed by the artist's performance.

"It sounds nice in theory," he retorts. "But there are four reasons why it's impossible. First: how do you plan to block the Echelon signal at the service providers? It would take days just to penetrate their systems. Not to mention..." Jay stops as he sees the disappointed look of a little boy on Doc's face. "What?" he asks.

"You hurt me, Jay... Really," Doc says.

"What did I say?"

Doc shakes his head disapprovingly, lips pinched. "More than twenty-five years we've known each other. A quarter of a century! You know I only sleep four hours a day?—when I sleep—What do you reckon I do the other twenty hours of the day?"

Doc turns to inspect his den. With arms spread, he invites Jay to look around. Indeed, from floor to ceiling, everything is computer equipment, network, electronics, telecommunications.

"What do you think I do with my time? 'Days' to penetrate the mobile operators' systems? Jay, seriously... I enter Vodafone's internal base to confirm the spelling of a name; it's faster for me than using the white pages..."

Jay raises his hands in surrender. "OK! ... You're a dangerous man, you know that?"

Doc smiles, giving him an amicable slap on the shoulder. "I could ... but I have a friend who keeps me on the straight and narrow."

Jeremy becomes serious again.

"Are you sure about your plan?"

Doc pretends not to have heard and looks behind him as if some noise had attracted his attention more than Jay's question.

"Doc... Seriously?"

The Doctor turns to Jay.

"Two hours to create the main routine of the program..." He makes a thoughtful grin. "... ten to fifteen minutes per operator..." Jay can't suppress a small lip pinch in admiration. "... and another three hours to develop the supervision console," Doc finishes. "For pure and simple blocking, of course. With a little more time, I could do something subtler and divert his signals. Phoenix would have no idea that his orders are coming to me instead of his nanobots..."

Jeremy evaluates the truthfulness of this estimate. They indeed have known each other for over twenty-five years and he knows Doc is not driven by pride. He decides to trust him.

"OK... Let's assume. That brings us to the second point. Phoenix has to receive the ransom's payment so we can track the money and find him. Something tells me the bill will be steep. I'm not sure someone will take the responsibility to gather and pay the amount."

"It seems to me that Phoenix has already proven the effectiveness of his technology, including with agents as witnesses, I doubt he needs another demonstration. And both Echelon and the CIA have a strong interest in keeping a low profile. If Phoenix is smart, he will stay around a number that these two can manage. It would do him no good to blackmail all governments; he would have no chance of peace and quiet if he did that. Your Major Kinkaid, couldn't he facilitate the payment of the ransom?"

Jeremy weighs his friend's arguments for a moment. Then he decides to answer: "I'll take care of it, I'll contact Kinkaid; anyway we'll need him and his resources if we go ahead."

"Ha? Because now we're going ahead?"

"Doc, I know you think ten times faster than me, we wouldn't be having this conversation if you hadn't already solved the other two reasons that are supposed to prevent us from executing your plan."

"Yes, but you're ruining my surprise..."

At this point, Jay can't help but laugh. And deep down, Doc understands that he has succeeded. At this moment, his friend is no longer thinking about Sarah. It won't last, of course, but for now, he will be totally focused on finding Phoenix, and he appreciates seeing his companion laugh.

"Alright, resumes Jeremy. Let's pretend nothing happened then... Third reason: To be able to trace the money through the maze of anonymous accounts that Phoenix had Brian creates, the only way would be to detect the use of his encryption protocol when it's used. However, this protocol—supposedly developed by KryptBoy—is unknown to us. I spent a night developing the necessary interface to decrypt KryptBoy's information, but without his two encoding keys, it's impossible to access it."

Doc has a triumphant smile. "What if I told you that I actually have these two keys?"

Jeremy frowns in confusion. "How?"

"Surprise!" shouts Doc. They arrived on our BBS two weeks ago.

"Our BBS? You kept the RoTP system active?"

"Hey! Nostalgia, nostalgia, sue me... There aren't many good old BBS running on modems anymore. Anyway... Two weeks ago a message arrived, with two sequences of numbers. At the time, I thought someone had dialed the wrong number and that the modem picking up had sent a packet of erroneous data, thus creating an entry. Obviously, since you explained the encrypted hidden USB key's file to me, this message takes on a whole new meaning..."

Jeremy slaps his forehead. "KryptBoy! Do you remember he told us how he built his own modem from his father's radio?"

"Yes, I remember, he couldn't afford to buy one. Only a Russian could manage to put together something like that."

"He must have found an old functioning analog line in the hangar where he was imprisoned. Without a handset, without a mic, he just had to be able to cobble together a makeshift modem."

"It's sad, so close to being able to ask for help."

"He must have been under surveillance as well, with a camera circuit or something. He really had to hide his game well."

"A basic modem, a station without multimedia functions... He was reduced to using text only." Ponders Doc.

"Lucky there are still some old BBS nostalgics."

Jeremy stands up and heads towards his jacket.

"Where are you going?" asks Doc.

"You don't think you're going to do everything alone, do you? Someone has to take care of the fourth and final reason that could block your plan... To be able to trace the encryption protocol and the monetary movements, you must have access to a main bank terminal, and that ... even you can't do it from here. Luckily, I have a very good client in Paris who just happens to have such a station in his basement... I think a routine visit is in order."