Wired - Douglas E. Richards [24]
He rummaged through his near empty refrigerator and found just enough leftover food to cobble together a dinner. He then spent several hours re-familiarizing himself with the contents of his laptop and the thousands of e-mails in his log. He needed to know the full extent of the data to which Kira Miller now had access.
Finally, he sat down in a comfortable chair in his living room and began reading the dossier on his quarry yet again. He knew he would probably read it dozens of times before this was over. And each time, as he learned more and more about her, he would bring a slightly different perspective to the material and would glean fresh insights.
Desh’s cell phone began vibrating, an unwelcome intrusion. He reached into his pocket, removed it, and examined the screen. It was a text message from Matt Griffin:
key discovery 4u. visit me asap. don’t call. computers, walls, phones: all might have ears.
The message drove Desh to a heightened state of awareness within seconds. Griffin had found something important and had reason to believe Kira had breached more than just Desh’s computer. Maybe Griffin was being overly cautious, maybe not, but Desh approved. He had liked the friendly hacker from the start, and the man had already demonstrated that his glowing reputation was well deserved.
Now it was time to find out if his computer expert had truly earned his pay.
Desh armed himself as usual, threw on an oxford shirt and windbreaker, and rushed to Griffin’s apartment, his mind racing almost as fast as his armored Suburban. The traffic was light, but even so the trip should have taken forty-five minutes. He made it in just over thirty.
Desh felt butterflies in his stomach as he strode briskly through the short, musty corridor of Griffin’s building, anxious to learn what the giant had uncovered. He passed several doors until he came to number 14D. He rapped once on the door and waited, staring at the peephole to help Griffin make a quick identification.
He waited for Griffin to disengage the deadbolt and chain as he had done before, but instead the handle began to turn. Years in the field had trained his subconscious to set off alarms when it encountered anything unexpected, no matter how small, even before his conscious mind could reason out why. He instantly became hyper-alert, just as a woman emerged from behind the door with a gun aimed at his chest.
Already moving forward in anticipation of trouble, Desh lashed out with his right arm to knock the gun lose, and at the same time threw his body sideways to offer a smaller target. But even as he lunged, he realized the woman had anticipated this move, and had begun backpedaling rapidly. She fired as she moved backwards, but despite her rapid retreat, she was forced to jerk her arm aside to avoid Desh’s vicious blow.
If the gun had contained bullets, Desh would have won the day. Despite her quick action and reflexes, he had interfered with her aim enough that the shot only hit his leg, and even injured in this way he would have been on his attacker in an instant, easily able to overpower her.
But she hadn’t fired bullets. She had fired electricity.
With a stun gun, a hit to the leg was just as effective as a hit to the chest. Instead of bullets, two electrode darts had leapt from her gun and stuck like Velcro to Desh’s pants, discharging their massive electric payload in an instant. The electricity completely overwhelmed the tiny electrical signals his brain was sending to control his muscles, causing him to convulse and collapse to the floor, disoriented and paralyzed.
From the instant his assailant had emerged from behind the door, he had known she could only be one person: Kira Miller.
A vague realization came across Desh’s addled mind that he was now sprawled on the floor, completely and utterly helpless, while one of the most dangerous women in the world stood calmly