LITMIR.BIZ

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      “I’ll sleep in a couple of hours,” he said.

      “I don’t think you have a couple of hours left in you,” she replied. “I understand that you’re concerned. But right now we’re in a lull. It’s a good time for you to grab a couple hours’ sleep. I want you fresh if they find him.”

      “When they find him,” Kurtzman corrected.

      “When,” she said, patting gently on the shoulder.

      Kurtzman placed his hands on his chair’s wheels. Price moved back, giving him room to maneuver. He backed the chair away from his computer and turned it in a tight 180-degree turn until they faced each other.

      “You look bad,” she said without a trace of derision. “Tired and worried. You want to talk about it?”

      “You know everything,” he said, shrugging.

      “I know that you have some sort of relationship with Gabriel Fox, and that somehow you’ve convinced yourself that going without sleep, food or exercise is the best way to make him reappear. Otherwise, I’m a little sparse on the details. You’ve hardly said three words during the past two days, other than to bark out an order to one of your crew. I’m worried about you.”

      Price, her honey-blond hair held back in a ponytail, her arms crossed over her chest, leaned against a nearby cabinet and stared at him. “So talk.”

      For what seemed like the millionth time, Kurtzman noticed that even without makeup and clad in blue jeans and an oversize flannel shirt, his old friend was a beautiful woman. The concern in her eyes only made her doubly so. The two had a close but purely platonic relationship, one in which they shared the emotional burdens that came with working for the country’s ultrasecret counterterrorism operation.

      “It’s the kid,” he said. “When I was in the think-tank business, before coming to work at this little Taj Mahal, Gabe was just a screwed-up kid from the Bronx. Not a drug-addicted, street-gang kind of kid, mind you. But he was definitely headed down the wrong path.”

      “How so?”

      “He was hacking into everything—Justice Department, Pentagon, Fortune 500 companies and banks. You name it and he was busting into it, making the security gurus in the business look like a bunch of damned monkeys. Occasionally he stole money when he could get it. But mostly he just seemed to enjoy the challenge. He’d break in, leave his signature and disappear.”

      “Signature?”

      “Called himself, X. Razor,” Kurtzman said, gesturing quote marks around the name. “The moniker was stupid as hell, in retrospect, just what you’d expect from a kid. But damned if he didn’t have everyone in the IT community scrambling.”

      “And you met him how?”

      “The Pentagon asked me to join a task force tracking him and I agreed. Frankly, I was intrigued. At least at first. After a while, I just got obsessed. You know, missing meals, sleep, all so I could work on finding this bastard.”

      “Imagine that.”

      “Funny, lady. Very funny. Anyway, the more I looked into it, the more I followed his patterns, studied his language, the more I realized he was just a kid. A talented hacker, hell, yeah. But just a kid nonetheless.”

      “And you found him?”

      Kurtzman nodded, smiled. “Yeah, our great hacker was a kid in a reform school in Cleveland. And he was breaking into all these systems using the principal’s computer. After hours, of course.”

      Price grinned. “You’re kidding.”

      He shook his head. “I kid you not. Little bastard had brass clangers. Anyway, once I’d located him, I decided to wait before turning him over to the Feds. The last thing I wanted was a couple of G-men busting into the place, flashing guns and badges. I hopped a plane for Cleveland, went to the school and caught him in the act. This big gangly kid with a green Mohawk haircut, earrings and tattoos turning all of us adults on our ears. And you know what the hell of it was?”

      Price shook her head.

      “He said, ‘I wondered when you dumb bastards would find me.’ Most kids would have been soiling their drawers and professing innocence. Or being quiet and defiant. But he seemed more disgusted than anything else. That it had taken us so long to track him down, I mean.”

      Kurtzman sipped his coffee and smiled at the memory. “That was when I got it,” he said. “Gabe just wanted attention. He was a genius, smarter than most of the adults he encountered, angry and bored with us all. The money he stole? He put most of it into accounts he’d set up at the banks. And it wasn’t because he had a moral problem with stealing. He just knew better than to go on a wild spending spree when you steal money.” Kurtzman tapped a thick forefinger against his temple. “Like I said, smart as hell. He was fourteen years old. How many fourteen-year-olds are that smart?”

      “A handful, maybe.”

      “Exactly.”

      “So what did you do with him?”

      He shrugged again. “What could I do? I couldn’t pretend like it didn’t happen or let him escape the consequences. But I also wasn’t going to let this kid rot in a detention center somewhere. I got him moved as close as I could to Virginia, a juvenile lockup in Alexandria. On my days off, I’d visit with him. I took him books and we’d talk computers for as long as they’d let us.”

      “You were like a surrogate parent.”

      “Maybe. The real articles weren’t exactly a national treasure. But I stayed in contact with him over the years, helped pay for his college, that sort of thing. He got married a year ago. In August.”

      “I remember you took the time off.”

      Kurtzman nodded. “Bastards took his wife,” he said. “Maria was a good woman, but whoever wanted to get the Cold Earth worm decided to kill her in the process. She was home when they broke in. Gabe wasn’t. So they killed her.”

      Kurtzman’s throat ached and he swallowed hard to dispel the feeling. This was one of the rare times when he wished he were an operative rather than some wheelchair-bound geek locked away in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Fox needed muscle, firepower. These were the only things Kurtzman couldn’t provide and it pained him to admit it, even to himself.

      “You’re doing all you can,” Price said, as though she could read his mind. “Trust me, Aaron, if I was in trouble, you’re one of the people I’d want in my corner.”

      Kurtzman gave her a grateful smile and a wink.

      “Frankly, if everything was going to hell, I’d rather have Mack the Bastard on my side,” Kurtzman said. He was referring to Mack Bolan, aka. the Executioner, the soldier who kept an arm’s-length relationship with Stony Man Farm, but often conducted missions on the ultrasecret organization’s behalf. Bolan, like most all of Stony Man’s paramilitary fighters, had been forged in the hellfire of combat.

      The corner of Price’s mouth wrinkled in a perturbed expression that told Kurtzman she was having none of it. “Go get some rest, Aaron. Or go work on your project. What’s it called?”

      “You mean, Predator?”

      “Right. The offensive firewall stuff you developed. We could sure use that around here.”

      He waved her off. “Sure. Yeah. I’ll be out of here in a few minutes. Besides, I finished that project a couple of days ago. I just have to test it.”

      “Whatever. Go. Sleep. Now. Don’t make me order you off the floor.”

      He threw a mock salute and a smile. “Ma’am, yes, ma’am.” He gestured over his shoulder at his computer with his thumb. “Let me just make sure I’m at a stopping point, and I’ll disappear for a couple of hours.”

      “Bear…” Price said, using his nickname.

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