Dance of Death by Douglas Preston & Lincoln Child

Author:Douglas Preston & Lincoln Child [Preston, Douglas & Child, Lincoln]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction, Thrillers, General, Suspense, Large Type Books, Suspense Fiction, Mystery & Detective, Serial Murders, Police Procedural, Psychological, Government Investigators, Psychological Fiction, Brothers, Sibling rivalry, False testimony
ISBN: 9780446576970
Publisher: Hachette Digital, Inc.
Published: 2005-06-14T04:00:00+00:00

A light snow had fallen on the white clapboard house that stood on the corner of Church Street and Sycamore Terrace in the quiet Cleveland suburb of River Pointe. The whitened streets were broad and silent, the streetlights casting pools of yellow light across thenocturnal landscape. The distant whistle of a train added a melancholy note to the silent neighborhood.

A shadow moved behind a shuttered window in a second-story gable—a figure in a wheelchair—barely outlined in the soft blue light that emanated from the depths of the room. Back and forth the figure went in silent pantomime, busy at some unknown task. Inside the room, metal racks stood from floor to ceiling, packed with electronic equipment: monitors, CPUs, printers, terabytes of hard drives, units for the remote seizure of computer screen images, cellular telephone scanner-interceptors, wireless routers, NAS devices, and Internet port sniffers. The room smelled of hot electronics and menthol.

The figure rolled this way and that, a single withered hand tapping keyboards, pressing buttons, turning dials, and punching keypads. Slowly, one by one, the units were being powered down, shut off, closed out. One by one, the lights went off, LAN and broadband connections were cut, screens went dark, hard drives spun down, LEDs winked out. The man known in the underground hacking community by the single name of Mime was shutting himself off from the world.

The last light to go off—a large blue flat-panel LCD—plunged the room into darkness.

Mime rested when he was finished, breathing in the unaccustomed darkness. He was now completely cut off from the outside world. He knew that, blacked out like this, he could not be found. Still, the information that had reached him from the man known as Pendergast, one of only two people in the world he trusted implicitly, made him uneasy.

Mime had not been cut off in many years from the vast torrents of data that washed over his house like an invisible ocean. It was a cold, lonely feeling.

He sat brooding. In a minute, he would turn to an entirely new set of controls, and new lights would come on in the room: the lights from a battery of video camera monitors and security readouts from a surveillance system set up around and within his house. It was a protective measure that had been installed years before, but that had never been needed. Until now.

Mime breathed in the darkness, and—for the first time in his life—he was afraid.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.