Sacred Cut by David Hewson

Author:David Hewson [Hewson, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Mystery, Thriller
ISBN: 9780440335740
Publisher: Dell
Published: 2005-12-27T05:00:00+00:00

THERE WAS TOO LITTLE TIME and too much information. It was like being lost in a forest of unreadable signs and signals. She’d typed in the name Nic had mentioned, “Henry Anderton,” and got a brief uninformative report on the attack that had triggered the alert over security for American visitors. It seemed routine, unconnected to the present case. The dead man was simply an academic who’d been the victim of unprovoked street violence in a small square in the ghetto, the Piazza Mattei. The name rang a bell. It had a tortoise fountain in the centre. Her father had shown it to her a couple of times, taken her picture standing beside it on one of their many walks around Rome. However, nothing connected that assault with the current investigation. The victim had been badly beaten. According to the records, he’d been flown back to America by his health insurer and hospitalized in Boston. A short search on the Internet proved that Costa’s suspicions were unfounded. Henry Anderton was a famous professor, now retired. There was only one item of minor interest in what she could glean of his background from the Net. One academic paper he’d published, on the structure and funding of Islamic terrorist groups, acknowledged the assistance of several FBI officers in the provision of advice and information. It was a tenuous link, but hardly earth-shattering.

Then she tried “Bill Kaspar” and got nothing, not a damn thing, which was surely odd. Grateful as she was for Fielding’s covert help, she understood it had its limitations. Fielding hadn’t taken her into the very heart of the FBI’s internal network, its mother lode of precious intelligence, brought up to date each minute of every day, collated from around the world by systems that never went anywhere close to a piece of public cable. She guessed he’d set some parameters himself, a cutoff date of some fifteen years earlier, judging by the dates on the material her searches found. Other parameters had been set for him. There was another raft of security clearances still above her that brought down the shutters the moment she went near them. That made sense. Fielding was senior, but he was only an embassy official working in the field. There were many doors he couldn’t open.

Yet there was a mine of precious intelligence here, if only she could find the right way to track down what she wanted. That required hitting the correct keywords—the terms that would take her straight to the relevant material. Without them, it was impossible to hope to read more than a fraction of what lay on the network. Instead, she had to prioritize. And if she did find anything, there was the problem, too, of what to do with it. Ordinarily she could have marked the documents she wanted and set them up as a set of reference points for future retrieval. Ordinarily, however, she wouldn’t be using a phoney identity to hack the Bureau’s database in a way

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