The Janson Command by Garrison Paul

Author:Garrison, Paul [Garrison, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Thrillers, General
ISBN: 0446564508
Google: mivrkmRwyuIC
Publisher: Hachette Digital, Inc.
Published: 2012-02-14T07:00:00+00:00

TWENTY-TWO

Jessica Kincaid received no messages from Paul Janson and no replies to her calls and texts when she changed planes at Johannesburg. She left more messages, then popped an Ambien and slept for eight excellent hours over the Indian Ocean. When she awoke, she flicked her phone on for a moment to surreptitiously check messages and still found none. Strange. She ran a credit card through the airliner’s handset to text Janson.

She had her finger on the button and was one millisecond from pressing Send when she remembered that in Spain the diver had somehow broken into her locked Audi without setting off the alarm. “Hadrian Van Pelt” or “Brud Vealon” likely had access to hot electronics. She put down the airline phone. Then she picked up her Iridium 9555 G and eyed it speculatively.

Assume the worst.

Her sat phone had been hacked.

At the moment, it didn’t matter how.

Assume the worst, again. If her phone was hacked, then when she had called Paul’s, whatever virus or bug the hacker put in hers had migrated into Janson’s. The messages she left for Janson could have been captured by Securité Referral. Maybe SR couldn’t crack the encryption. Maybe they could.

Using the Qantas handset, Kincaid dialed a distress number she knew by heart. Back when she had worked for Consular Operations, if she suspected that her phone or laptop had been tapped or hacked the procedure was to telephone a secure subbasement in the State Department’s Truman Building where high-tech guys with tool belts would try to help. When you were working with Janson, the procedure was similar, though who picked up the phone or where they were was anyone’s guess.

CatsPaw, the Phoenix Foundation, and the eponymous Janson Associates were more virtual than physical. Brick-and-mortar headquarters were expensive, distracting, and vulnerable. Employees in them were identifiable and exposed to attack at work, on their way to work, and in their own homes. Rather than maintain—and have to defend—a fortress, Janson used the Internet and the Web to link independent contractors into a organization that had no physical existence.

Kincaid had never met the expert she was telephoning and knew him only by his number. What distinguished him from his State Department counterpart was his independence. It was unlikely he wore a security badge—government or private—and was jockeying for a closer parking space in a vast employee lot. As the phone rang, she pictured a skinny long-haired guy in a windowless room humming with computer cooling fans and illuminated by walls of backlit monitors. He might work alone or he might work with other geeks who looked like him. He could be in a suburban tech park in Silicon Valley or Beverly, Massachusetts, or the Czech Republic.

* * *

JERRY’S SPORTSMAN’S PARADISE, a bar in a New Jersey strip mall off Route 17, was a fifteen-minute drive from the expensive bedroom communities of Saddle River, Ho-Ho-Kus, and Wyckoff. Of the twelve patrons watching football reruns and horse races on the flat-screens midafternoon on a weekday, four were

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