Read Hostile Intent for Free Online

the NSA/CSS arsenal: Echelon video feeds, RSS chatter sorters, real-time simultaneous translations of Internet café activity in China, India, Pakistan, Lebanon, Iran, and Saudi Arabia, key-word trigger-coded for instant relay. All conversations could be heard live or as downloaded audio, and read as saved transcriptions in both the original language and in English.
    He sampled a few, dipping in and out. He’d lost track of how many languages he spoke fluently, because when you started toting up you had to factor in dialects, subdialects, and even random bastardizations like Hawaiian pidgin and Marshallese. Nothing about what was happening in Edwardsville. Plenty of the usual stuff—angry but idle threats against the Great Satan, obscure religious and cultural diatribes, boastful European white supremacist rants, obscure American-sourced swagger—but nothing that stood out. No trip wires. And trip wires were his business.
    Nearly a decade after September 11, the American security apparatus had come a long way. Plenty of attacks had been foiled, some—especially early on, when al-Qaeda had the tactical advantage—particularly horrific. There was the Arab cell that had come down from Canada, trying to pass themselves off as American Indians on one of the upstate New York reservations while they waited for the activation codes on a low-yield nuclear device they had smuggled from the former Soviet Union to Halifax, financing the operation by bootlegging cigarettes from the reservation to the outside world and pocketing a fortune in tax avoidance.
    The good guys had lucked out on that one: an alert cop in Watertown had noticed the ink on the phony tax stamp rubbing off on his hand, and grabbed the “Indian,” who had led him to the other cell members. The cop was shot and killed during the rendezvous, but he had been smart enough to order backup and so the group was rounded up and sent to some especially nasty rendition prisons in Egypt and Slovakia. The cop’s widow got a handsome payout from the feds; he got buried at Arlington and the public was never the wiser.
    The phone stayed stubbornly silent. Just as well, probably.
    Tom Powers stood up and stepped out of the secure room. The rest of his house on North West Street was equally secure, although less dramatically, so he didn’t seal the room as he did when he left home.
    To enter the front door, for example, he inserted the key into the lock, but rather than aligning a series of tumblers, the key’s real work was done by his fresh thumbprint on the head of the key, which was read by the scanner in the door to allow entry.
    Once inside, he would glance at the mirror/retinal scanner, which flashed his eyeballs. Anyone who somehow had gained unauthorized entry via the front door—an intruder who forced him to open the door at gunpoint, for example—would miss that beat, with the result that a security gate would descend from the ceiling and trap him in the antechamber, where he could easily be neutralized or dispatched. Video cameras connected directly by dedicated fiber-optic cable to NSA/CSS headquarters in Maryland could be called up on any video screen in the house, and the giant wall-mounted flat screen in the den doubled as a backup, fail-safe control module in a worst-case scenario. Even an EMP (electromagnetic pulse) blast couldn’t knock out his communications.
    He looked out the window, into his backyard, at one of his favorite sights. From the street, the house was just another postwar brick two-story structure, indistinguishable from thousands of others in this part of northern Virginia. But what almost nobody knew was that, at the edge of the backyard, a small marker, buried in the brush, once marked the southern tip of the District of Columbia. Originally laid out on land ceded by Maryland and Virginia, the District was conceived as a diamond, bisected by the Potomac. Virginia got its land back when the federal district stopped at the river. But there