Page 11 of Hot Intent

Decisively, Alex crossed Dmitri off his list of suspects.Who then?

The problem with an organization like Doctors Unlimited was it used its legitimate work to passively collect intelligence on the side. André reported what his people observed. Nothing more. Nobody 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 CIA’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 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. 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 e-mail 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 globally 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 anti-hacking 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. “No. Go on without me.”

He probably should kiss her goodnight or in some other way act affectionate and social, but his attention was riveted on how his computer had just been shut down. Andwhy?

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 back-up files.

He was still working hours later when he heard Dawn stir over the intercom. He left his office and went to her room to rock her back to sleep. He sat down with her in the rocking chair beside her crib and let the deep peace of the night and her sweet baby smell pass over him.

How could something so innocent exist in a world as evil as he knew it to be? How was he ever going to keep her safe from it all? The weight of the responsibility pressed in on him until he struggled to breathe. He laid the sleeping baby back 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 all his other accounts while he was at it.

He’d barely finished before the phone on his desk rang. What was goingon? It was four a.m.

“Go ahead,” he snapped.

“Mr. Peters? This is Advanced Security Systems. I’m sorry to disturb you at this hour. But we’ve just gotten notification that there has been an attempt to break in to your house’s alarm protocols on our Internet server. 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 down thecondo in three minutes. I’ll be in touch in a few hours with further instructions.”

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