Page 10 of Her Ruthless Protector

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They’d spent five days on the USS Mason after the raid in Yemen. Despite Max’s expectations, Kane hadn’t been able to work miracles in the truck. That’s what happened when you didn’t have proper power sources available. Barkat al Fadi wasn’t talking, and the cell phone had been stepped on and crushed so it was useless. The two hard drives had been wiped clean. But the laptop looked for just a second to have gold, but it ended up being fool’s gold. Or was it?

He’d cloned the hard drive over to Langley and his buddies at Navy Cyber Warfare to see what they could find, but something in the laptop’s code tickled his memory banks. Finally, it clicked. This was kid code. It reminded him of what he worked on when he was thirteen, creating code, all pimples, braces, and hormones. All he’d cared about was computers, and he hadn’t read a lot of books or researched much, he’d flown by the seat of his pants. That’s what this was.

As Kane looked at the corrupted data, some of it started to make sense, if you were a twelve-year-old whiz-kid, because you thought differently. This kid had been coding on the fly. Dammit, he’d bet his last dollar, which was fucking substantial, that one of the kids in that room Leo had been guarding was the one who had designed this code.

Kane relaxed, trying to go back to a simpler time when he’d been creating and coding for the sheer joy. Back before he’d sold his app for serious coin and become a big deal. He leaned back in his chair and cracked his fingers. Life would be better with a case of Mountain Dew, he’d just have to pour half a cup of sugar in his coffee to get the right buzz going.

“You going to get this?” Max asked as he came into the tiny room that Kane had been given to work in on the ship. “My God, how much sugar are you pouring into that mug?”

“Don’t judge,” Kane sighed as he took a sip. “This helps.”

“Does that mean you’re going to get some information off this machine?”

“How did the questioning go with al Fadi? Did they get anything?” Kane asked as Max poured himself a cup of coffee and sipped it plain black.

“Not yet. They’re still hopeful, I think they’re nuts. It’s a shame about the cell phone.” Max peered over at what Kane was doing. “That looks like gibberish.”

“It’s prepubescent genius gibberish.” He pointed to a spot on the screen. “Do you see this? He totally skipped the normal library framework here and went straight to the underlying concept of concealing the targets.”

Max stood up straighter behind him. “So, you have the targets. Why didn’t you say so in the first place?”

“No, that’s what’s so fucking wonderful about this. It plugged in fifteen potential targets in Oman, and parsed the degree of difficulty and visibility, then bumped it up against a random generator.”

“Kane, start making sense. Do we, or don’t we, have targets?”

“We have four potential targets. We don’t have a why. That’s the part that’s killing me. Why the hell is al-Qaeda looking to do damage to events and places in Oman? What’s the upside?”

“They’re al-Qaeda, it’s what they do.” Max sank down in the chair beside him and took another sip of his coffee, then set it down on the table.

Kane gave Max a sideways look. His lieutenant threw up his hands. “I know, I know. We’ve got to get our hands on Saif al Fadi and Hamza al Libi to find out their intent, but if we know where they’re planning to attack, that’s something. We can shut those things down.”

Kane snorted. “Good luck doing that.”

“What do you mean?”

“One’s the OPEC summit that’s planned in a little over two weeks. The other has something to do with the opening of the new terminal at the Muscat airport, the third is the Amnesty International Conference, and the fourth is the Eurovision Song Contest.”

“What the hell is that last one?” Max wanted to know.

“Asher told me. His mom is from Belgium so she’s a fan and forced Asher and his brothers to watch it. Hell, she’s been sending him YouTube snippets of the current contestants. He says it’s America’s Got Talent. He loves it. But from what I can see, it’s America’s Got Talent without America and without the talent.”

“Sounds lovely,” Max said. “So, when are all of these things taking place?”

“The contest started four weeks ago, but guess when the grand finale is taking place?”

“Could it be around the same time as the Amnesty Conference and OPEC summit?” Max sighed.

Kane took a swig of coffee. “Give the man a cigar.”

“You got anything else?” Max asked.

“There’s something else that’s deeper. It’s really, really deep and corrupted. It’s a video file. Could just be some porn, but I don’t want to make any assumptions. I’m going to write a script and run it against the system. It’ll take a few days, but it will pull it up.”

“Confident, aren’t you?” Max grinned.

“Yep.”