Collateral Damage by Dale Brown Page B

then left the suite.
    A lone in the elevator, Kharon took the small USB key from his pocket. It looked like the right device, but he would not put it past the princess—or the Venezuelan—to try and cheat him somehow.
    He smiled as he left the building, giving the surveillance cameras a big, toothy grin.
    The princess was wrong. He was not trying to steal information about the American weapons. On the contrary. The USB key was one that his agents had used against them.
    The Russian agents, to be more specific. Kharon didn’t trust them to dispose of it on their own and had insisted that he get it back. The princess had saved him the trip to Sicily—a necessary precaution, as he didn’t want to be linked to the “accident” in any way.
    Not yet.
    He crossed the street to a second hotel, the Awahi Sahara. Aimed primarily at businesspeople, the hotel had fallen on hard times since the start of the second revolution; it was less than a quarter full, and room rates had been slashed to thirty euros a night, nearly a tenth of what they had been before the war.
    But Kharon hadn’t come for a room. He went straight to the business center at the rear of the lobby, slipped a key card into the door lock and went inside. An older Italian gentleman sat at the computer at the far end of the row, flipping slowly through e-mail.
    Kharon pulled the chair out in front of a computer. He moved the mouse to bring up the system screen, then took the USB drive from his pocket. With a glance toward the old Italian—he appeared absorbed in his work—Kharon pushed the key into the USB slot at the rear of the CPU.
    The key didn’t register as a drive.
    So far so good.
    He brought up the browser and typed the general address of Twitter. Entering an account name and password he had composed more or less at random, he did a search for #revoltinLibya.
    The Tweet he needed was three screens deep. He copied the characters, then pasted them into the browser. That brought him to a Web page filled with numbers.
    It was a self-test page, allowing him to ping the USB disk. A set of numbers appeared on the screen. He looked at the last seven: 8–23–1956.
    Ray Rubeo’s birthday. It was the right key.
    He backed out, then moved the mouse to the Windows icon at the lower left of the screen. He went to the search line and typed run, adding the address of a small program he had installed on the computer several days before.
    When he was finished, the unedited video of the Sabre bombing mission had been uploaded to half a dozen sites.
    A fter his mother died, Neil Kharon had gone east to live with an aunt and uncle. They were older, and not particularly warm people. Alone and isolated, he had concentrated on his schoolwork. It was an inverse acting out—his way of rebelling was to study harder and learn everything he could.
    He soaked up knowledge. He loved math and science. Though not rich, his guardians had enough sense to get him into MIT for undergraduate work, and then, with the help of another relative, to Cambridge. From there, he studied on his own, making connections to labs in France, Germany, and Russia.
    Russia especially. There, still barely twenty-one, he had been hired to work with a state research lab. At first he didn’t know, or at least could pretend that he didn’t know, that his real paymasters were officials in the Sluzhba Vneshney Razvedki, or SVR. Within a few months it was obvious. By then he no longer cared.
    He was a star for them, a hired gun capable of anything. He learned to steal, to sabotage, and to live in the shadows. Always with one goal—someday he would know enough to ruin the man he blamed for his mother’s death.
    The Russians had been most helpful, paying him extremely well and, for the most part, allowing him to work where and when he wanted. They, too, were interested in Rubeo’s inventions, though obviously for different reasons. An entire team had