Wired - Douglas E. Richards [15]
After a little more than an hour he returned the dossier to his briefcase and began his trek home. Her file hadn’t given him much to go on, nor had he expected it to. If the girl’s background would have led to an obvious approach, others would have found it by now.
Kira Miller had been able to hide her true nature quite well. From a very young age she had been extremely talented, ambitious, and competitive. When she set her mind to something she had accomplished it. This didn’t always win her a lot of friends growing up, and being jumped ahead in school several years did nothing to help her social life.
Even as an adult she tended to make few friends, always keeping her eye on the ball; be it setting the record for youngest ever molecular neurobiology Ph.D. at Stanford or power-climbing up the corporate ladder. In college she had dated some, but she never managed to sustain a relationship for more than eight or nine months. Desh knew that most men would find her brilliance intimidating.
The file elaborated quite extensively on everything that Connelly had told him, laying out her communications with terror groups, how these communications had been found, the airtight evidence gathered against her for the murders of Lusetti and her brother, and the Ebola gene therapy plot.
After the murders, the police investigation had revealed she had spent an inordinate amount of time in NeuroCure’s animal labs late at night, but had managed to hide this activity. The employee badge she’d been issued to unlock the door after hours was designed to record the holder’s identity and time of entry in the main computer, but she had ingeniously altered the software to prevent this from happening.
Investigators had also found that Kira had ordered far more rodents from suppliers than the company had needed for experiments. Since she was responsible for inventory, this hadn’t been caught earlier.
It was clear she had been performing secret animal experiments almost every night. In retrospect, this made sense—chilling sense. She must have brought the Jihadists some evidence that she could execute on the strategy she was proposing to get them to pay her the substantial sums of money she was known to have in banks around the world. An animal proof of concept, as it were.
Connelly and USASOC had vast resources at their disposal, both human and otherwise, and yet they hadn’t come close to finding this girl. Only someone extremely careful and extremely clever could possibly elude a government-sponsored manhunt for this long. And that was really the rub on this one. The prey was far smarter than the hunter. Desh didn’t feel any macho need to downplay his own intelligence, which was considerable, but it was undeniable that hers was in another league. So how to catch someone smarter than yourself?
It was all in your attitude. You didn’t plot a strategy designed to catch her making a mistake. This is what the others probably focused on. Instead, you counted on her not making a mistake. You counted on her doing everything exactly right. This was the answer.
As much as he had come to hate the endless violence with which he had long been associated, puzzling out the location of a dangerous adversary intent on eluding capture was a task he found completely absorbing. It was the ultimate challenge. His task was to locate a single human being among the more than six billion inhabitants of the planet, one who could be hiding almost anywhere on the incomprehensibly large surface of the Earth. So how to narrow this down?
He shot by an eighteen-wheeler as if it were standing still, completely lost in thought. His foot was heavy on the gas pedal by nature, and when he didn’t actively control himself, his default speed was usually twenty miles per hour over the posted limit. Despite conscious efforts