The Hidden Vector: A Spy Thriller

by Mathew Snyder

  “I had no idea she was a Pennsylvania girl,” Harley said.

  Paul stood mute as Harley’s voice snapped him out of the raw memory. Any comfort in the telling was fleeting, and he now observed the man who all but ran the CIA standing in his kitchen.

  “Harley, why are you here?”

  Late in the day, the rasp in his voice was heavy and came almost as a whisper.

  “None of this is going to come easy for you, I’m afraid.”

  Paul shrugged and looked at the floor.

  “I’m listening,” he said.

  Harley stretched his mouth and rubbed the edges of it with his heavy fingers and thumb.

  “To start, it doesn’t look like this was an accident. Can I take a wild guess that doesn’t surprise you much?”

  “No, it doesn’t.”

  “It just seemed too unlikely for me to dismiss with what’s going on. With respect, nothing like this is timed real well for anybody. But here we’ve got another thing entire. So, I had some friends of mine at the Bureau look into things.”

  “I appreciate that.”

  Harley dismissed the sentiment with a mild frown.

  "They owed me a favor or two as it was. The police report says another vehicle collided with your wife and her friend’s vehicle. The collision pushed them off the road and into that concrete divider. They’re still looking for the vehicle. Maybe a Dodge truck or SUV. County sheriff’s team seems to think it’s a drunk driver hit and run.”

  “I already know all of this,” Paul said.

  He knew the exact spot, though he couldn’t bring himself to drive past. It was along his commute from Langley. He could take a longer route, or drive past the scene of his wife’s death as long as he worked there. He tried not to think about it for now.

  “What you don’t know is that two vehicles collided with the car. One at the front right fender, another from the rear. One of my Bureau friends lifted traces of a black vehicle from the rear.”

  “Did he share that with the police in Tyson?” Paul asked.

  “He did, but they chalked it up to all part of the accident. At best, they’re looking for another witness.”

  “They won’t find anyone.”

  “No, sir. They will not. They might find the vehicles, but it’s a safe bet that will be that.”

  Paul poured the steaming water into the French press and let it steep. He stirred the coarse grounds and stared into the swirling murk as he considered the finality of Harley’s comment. They ambushed her. He couldn’t imagine the terror she had felt, and he didn’t want to. He should have stayed at the benefit. He could have been with her then, but all he wanted to do was leave all those damn socialites at the party and that smarmy Crowley guy and get back to his work.

  “Paul, you all right?” Harley said.

  Paul poured the coffee into a pair of white mugs and slid one toward Harley.

  “Do you know a collections officer named Brian Crowley?”

  “Don’t know him myself. But the name’s awful familiar. He works in HUMINT, I think.”

  “That’s right. He was there that night. At the benefit. He came up to me on his own and asked about getting transferred under me at NCS.”

  “And you think that was a little too friendly?”

  “Wasn’t it? I don’t know what to think any more.”

  “Is he on your short list for the Scorpio Compact?”

  “He is now.”

  “Don’t jump to conclusions, now. He’d have to have some real brass to reveal himself like that. Besides, I don’t know how someone like him could pull all this off. It’s just as good a bet it’s someone else inside.”

  “Harley, there were two cars, right?”

  “So it seems.”

  “Then what makes you think it’s just one mole?”

  Harley nodded as he acknowledged the possibility. He took a drink of the coffee. Once he had tasted it, he took another.

  “Could be the guy’s just climbing the company ladder. Just bad timing on a rough night. Then again, he’d have access to some of the reports that mention Scorpio. And he could coordinate with someone higher up. Jesus Christ,” Harley said shaking his head at the possibility.

  Paul sipped his coffee and let the warmth spread through him, but he felt less at ease. Nothing about their conversation seemed right. Harley had resorted to sneaking to his back door and checking the windows as if he didn’t notice. Who was out there? He wondered if they listened even now, invisible intruders prying into his home. They’d taken away everything, and still he jumped at shadows just as he had the night they took her from him.

  “Who the hell are these people, Harley?”

  “Near as I can tell, it’s the same old trouble. Radicals who hate the West. Hackers and nihilists who want to usher in some crackpot new world order. This Scorpio Compact of theirs? It’s just a damn manifesto against hegemony or state surveillance. Take your pick. The name’s nothing special. Whoever created it released it in November a few years ago. You know, like under the sign of Scorpio, like the Zodiac. All the chatter we pick up, and it’s just the same kind of noise it always has been. More secular, maybe. More technologically savvy. But it’s the same old bullshit.”

  “Then what’s the appeal? How the hell could they penetrate the Agency? Our people aren’t like this.”

  “Who knows? Money? A threat? Lord knows, you might be next in line if this keeps up. It doesn’t matter. With that line of thinking, all you’re doing is looking for a way to disbelieve that there are a pack of wolves circling around us. They’re circling, and the why don’t much matter right now.”

  He gripped the edge of the counter at his sides and clenched his teeth. His gut tightened. He wanted to scream and yell at them if they were listening. There was no reason to it. Not even despair, but an emotion he couldn’t name festered within him, a kind of rage and confusion that he had to exorcise from his body. Instead he stifled it, swallowing it up into himself with a physical effort that kept his body still and rigid, his hands gripping ever tighter. The moment passed as though a white light had left his eyes and he calmed himself again. He took a heavy breath and exhaled slow. If Harley noticed, he just gave him the time to breathe.

  “What now?” he said.

  “For you? Nothing. You take care of yourself here. Take all the time you need. I’ll make sure you have that at least.”

  “I can’t do that. It’s only going to get worse. Christ, Harley, this is what they want. They want me off this thing.”

  “You can’t save the world by yourself. Look at you. You can’t even think straight. Grieve for your wife. Give it a few days, at least.”

  “We don’t have a few days.”

  “I wasn’t asking,” Harley said.

  Paul turned and poured half of his coffee in the sink. The taste of it lingered on his tongue, and it summoned memories of mornings with sleepy-eyed Janey. Nothing he could do would change it, just as nothing he could say would change Harley’s mind. He was powerless, and that aggravated him even more.

  “What about Pierce? They’re coming for him next,” Paul said.

  “You’re probably right. Sounds like Pierce can take care of himself. I’ll do what I can, but the priority has to be our counterintelligence efforts here.”

  “Then he’s on his own.”

  With a few more kind words, Harley moved to the back door and fumbled with the switches to turn off the back porch light. Paul shook his enormous hand, and Harley entered the midnight gloom where he stepped over one of Janey’s planters at the edge of the patio. Then he vanished from Paul’s sight to navigate the neighbors’ back yards to the street.

  Paul stood in the doorway alone, transfixed by the hesitant chirps of crickets in the night before he went back inside. He wandered the house and shuffled through the rooms where shafts of light fell onto the floor from the streetlights outside. The spaces were all there, but the sensations strange. The ladies had tidied every paper in his study. The dark
surface of the old desk lay bare. A weak scent of antiseptic trespassed his favorite retreat. The dining room appeared suspended in time like a museum display after hours. He passed his hands over the padded chairs and their ornamental backs. Janey had them brought over from Columbia. Now they stood erect and unused, all traces of dust and her boxes of fundraiser folders cleaned away. He trundled up the stairs.

  The spare bedroom doors greeted him like tombstones. He couldn’t explain to himself why, but he opened each and peered into silent rooms where neatly made beds occupied the stillness. Behind one, Janey’s white sewing table reflected a little light peeking through the trees from the street. He closed the doors again and crept into his bedroom as he had on countless late nights before. Overhead the ceiling fan spun, flickering and quiet. A glow from her closet door framed a perfect box of light on the far wall. He moved to switch off the light and again without reason opened the door. As his eyes tuned to the brightness of the light overhead, he tasted her scent. The alchemy of her perfume and lotion filled the back of his throat, a smell like jasmine and honey. He stood dazed. His mind fought the sensation that she was just there in the room behind him, waiting for him to come to bed. He closed the closet door and left the bedroom undisturbed.

  He wanted nothing to do with sleep, and so he fought with exhaustion. He slouched on the sofa in his slacks and undershirt. Hours passed, and he counted them out of habit. His watch glinted, and he calculated the hours between here and the operations underway. Something about the sense of sunrise elsewhere in the world kept him occupied until exhaustion overtook him and he fell into a fitful sleep. He dreamed anxious dreams where he climbed out of a quarry filled with black water. At each carved ledge he scaled, he found a familiar face who would climb no farther with him. He couldn’t remember their names.

  Chapter 16: Ride Along

  Bucharest, Romania

  7:32 a.m., Friday, June 21

  From the solitude of an empty office, Ethan watched the sun’s light spread on the Bucharest skyline. He had slept a little in the office chair, his feet propped up on a desk with a too small woolen blanket draped over his legs. He considered what awaited him in the parking garage. He mapped out by memory the exact space where he left his car, and what to do if the target came alone. He wouldn’t come alone, so what to do if he brought friends? He considered one vehicle or two. More? He recounted the paces between his Volkswagen and the lane where the target would arrive. He recalled the placements of every camera and their position. He visualized himself at his most vulnerable, away from his Volkswagen and moving toward the target’s vehicle. He imagined all that could go wrong, and everything that he could control. He saw himself from their perspective and imagined a half-dozen ways they could kill him.

  From the other side of the office suite he heard the others stirring as they prepared for another day of trailing targets in the city streets. They mumbled to one another as if the reality of their mission weighed down the voices. Wade’s baritone grumble echoed across the concrete floors. Ethan envied his partner’s ability to sleep anywhere and wake alert and aware. Wade met the mission like a soldier, his voice stern and serious, his mind focused in the moment without thought of the future.

  They assembled in the conference room. The odor of Russell’s cigarette wafted in, intermingled with the scent of the fresh coffee Tereza brought from a nearby street cafe where she parked her little blue Renault. It was on the north side of the boulevard, pointed west as they had rehearsed.

  Ethan entered the conference room, and they greeted him with a pause in the discussion. Wade nodded to him, and the others turned their eyes his way.

  “Morning everyone,” he said.

  Their murmurs resumed as they mused on the weather and the direction of the summer sun and the intensity of Friday morning traffic. Tereza handed him a cup of coffee and turned back to her section of the table where she toggled her radio and fidgeted with a discreet earpiece. Everyone stood around the table, knights of the round, focused on the gear before them. A crisscross of cables and adaptors that charged their radios and phones splayed across the table amid the steaming paper mugs of coffee. Russell spread a large tourist’s map of the city center before him, weighed down by an empty cup he used as an ashtray.

  Ethan placed a laptop on the table and rotated it to reveal the screen to the team. A photo on the screen showed a scrawny young man holding up a bottle of liquor and mugging for the camera with a drunken scoff and gap-toothed grin.

  “Operations came through,” he said. “This is Cosmin Moraru. He likes to call himself Zmeu. Some kind of hacker nickname. Everyone outside this room thinks he is our target. Let’s keep it that way. Cosmin here is a worm on a hook. We want the group he says he represents. He’s ambitious. He started out in computer crime. Mostly scams. Now he seems to have branched out into smuggling unusual goods in and out of Europe.”

  “So, he’s smarter than he looks?” Tereza asked. She sneered at his photo, and the others chuckled at her disgust.

  “I think you could say that,” Ethan said. “He’s clever enough to make friends and not get caught. But his file suggests his ambition is greater than his ability. I’m hoping that means he’s eager to make a deal. The last thing I need is a nervous kid playing gangster.

  “I’ll make contact on the fourth floor at 0800 hours. I’ll signal you with radio taps just like I have been all week. One tap for our guy and each of his friends. Hold position until I can confirm the vehicle to you.”

  “I still say you need someone with you up there, man,” Wade said.

  “Everyone’s assigned for a reason. Stick with the plan.”

  “Plans don’t mean shit if things go south with this guy and his pals.”

  “No changes. Let’s go over it again.”

  He leaned over the map with Russell and nodded as everyone pointed and pushed on the map, confirming their routes and signals in a robotic cadence. Russell extinguished his last cigarette and dropped it in the cup. He folded the map in sections while the others cleared the table and tucked concealed radios in their pockets and under their clothes.

  “You got that new sidearm I gave you?” Wade asked.

  Ethan nodded. He’d tucked the compact Glock in the back of his waistline, hidden under his light blue jacket. Wade armed himself whenever he could. But the others had no protection outside of their cars and their wits. If things became violent, he had instructed them to run and not return to the office building.

  They took turns leaving, wandering the streets and waiting near their cars. He and Wade sat on the stairs at the northwest exit of the building, awaiting their turn to find their position.

  “I don’t like this one, man,” Wade said.

  “It’s no different than all the rest.”

  “You’re wrong. This one’s different. They know we’re coming. They’re looking for you. We aren’t holding all the cards here, you know what I mean? I’m not questioning your plan. It’s just I don’t like the circumstances.”

  “We don’t get a choice on that. It’s the best we’ve got with what we have.”

  “I know it. But I don’t have to like it. Just don’t get yourself killed. You still owe me.”

  “More than one,” Ethan said.

  He pulled the cell phone he had purchased the night before out of his pocket and handed it to Wade.

  “What’s this?”

  “If things do go south, I need you to take care of that.”

  “What is this, a burner phone? What for?”

  “Nothing good. It’s personal.”

  Wade took the phone and turned it in his hand, grimacing.

  “Bad idea, man. You shouldn’t have this.”

  “I know. That’s why I’m giving it to you. For safe keeping. If I don’t see you later, get rid of it for me, okay?”

  “This for Sarah?” Wade asked.

  Ethan nodded. They clasped hands and Wade returned his nod one last time. Ethan walked into the bright light of mor
ning and left his friend behind.

  ◆◆◆

  The acrid stench of urine assailed Ethan’s senses in the parking garage stairwell. He climbed to the fourth floor and made his way to the Volkswagen. The garage level was quiet and sparsely occupied by eight or nine cars left overnight. To his relief, none were near his car. He situated himself in the driver seat and placed everything he carried for the op in the seat beside him. He checked the handheld radio out of habit, though he had replaced the batteries himself at the conference table. A coil of black wire for his earpiece hung from the device in a clump, and next to that lay the dull black pistol that Wade gave him. He lifted the gun and checked the chamber.

  His phone held a message with Moraru’s number and his absurd photo. Beside that sat a stack of business cards he kept handy. Ryan Sawyer, Consumer Electronics. They were wrapped in a doubled rubber band, the corners folded here and there. Each gave an address in Istanbul, which last he knew was the address of a place to get awful tea and coffee. He took in a hard breath and waited. Over an hour to go.

  When the hour approached, Wade activated his radio mic without talking. Ethan heard the rise of the city traffic as a steady hiss. Wade patrolled near the rail stop as they’d planned. From his position on the street, he would see any approach to the garage entrance. The signal meant Wade saw something approach. Three clicks chirped into Ethan’s earpiece. Ethan acknowledged the signal, and he tucked the Glock into the waistline at his back. His stomach turned, and he felt the adrenaline radiate into his fingertips. Three cars made things more difficult.