by S L Shelton
Nick stared at her, his piercing gaze an obvious interrogation ploy.
She shook her head at him. “You can cut the spooky eyes,” she said after a moment of enduring the discomfort. “Unless you plan on waterboarding me, the answers are going to be the same…at least until we get new information that contradicts them.”
“Waterboarding isn’t a bad idea,” Nick muttered as he turned his back.
“Well if you want me to tell you what you want to hear, why didn’t you say so?” Ruth snapped.
Nick turned to face her again with real anger building in his eyes. “I know you’d rather have John Temple running the investigation, but the guys we are looking for burned his house down with him in it, and then attacked a well-guarded CIA training facility with high-tech weaponry in the middle of a US military post…just so they could ask Scott Wolfe a few questions.” The volume of voice rose with each word until he was yelling at her. “So please, pretty fucking please, forgive me for being a bit over the fucking top on my demands for leads…but so far we have exactly nothing!”
Ruth had been slowly sinking deeper into her chair as Nick’s rant progressed. When he had finished, his face red and eyes wide, he straightened himself, looking more than a bit embarrassed at his outburst.
Several uncomfortably quiet seconds passed as the edge in the room became almost palpable. The noticeable return of the clacking of analysts’ fingers on their keyboards broke the tension.
Nick exhaled loudly as if he had been holding his breath for a long while. “I’m sorry,” he said quietly, directed only to Ruth.
She nodded uncomfortably and turned to start working again. Nick leaned over her shoulder, noticeably without touching her. “There’s something wrong with the security checks… We need to find out what it is,” he whispered.
Ruth turned and glared at him. “Do you want me to go re-interview his contact list?” she asked, taunting him with a ridiculous suggestion—analysts didn’t interrogate. “The answer isn’t in the security checks. Maybe we should focus on Bailey.”
Greg Bailey…the CIA instructor responsible for setting the explosive charges inside the training facility. He, at least, was still alive.
“He gave us everything he knew,” Nick said. “The bank account is empty, and the instructions to him were from a non-traceable source.”
“I can’t believe he was working blind,” Ruth replied. “He didn’t just wake up one morning with a fat bank account and start following orders from some anonymous texter.”
“He gave us everything,” Nick repeated. “Trust me…I was there. I applied the motivation for him to be truthful.”
Ruth shook her head. “It doesn’t make any sense.”
“He detailed where the charges came from, how many people he estimated he would kill with the explosions, he told us where the missing radios were, he told us the number of his contact, and the number of payments he had received,” Nick listed. “He even told us how many ground troops the attackers were supposed to have with them.”
“But nothing about Eric, or the hack, or the bank accounts for the payoffs, or even who his initial contact was,” Ruth added. “It seems that with that level of operational knowledge, he would have been able to fill in a few more holes for us.”
“He didn’t know,” Nick replied.
Ruth looked at him incredulously.
“Don’t give me that look,” Nick snapped. “I nearly drowned the fucker when he ran out of information. He gave us everything he had.”
Ruth shook her head. Nick’s faith in “enhanced interrogation” was more devout than her own. She had seen the results before, and she knew that, despite the fact it made higher-ups feel better that the bad guys were suffering, waterboarding, sleep deprivation, and punching weren’t always the reliable source of INTEL that these guys claimed it could be.
She just shook her head, prompting Nick to turn his back on her again. “The hole in Eric Hicks’s background check is there…somewhere,” Nick said without looking at Ruth. “Find it.”
Ruth rubbed her eyes as she stretched her back against her chair. She had consumed far too much coffee, and Nick’s outburst had increased her stress level. Her nerves and her bladder were at maximum capacity when she rose to go to the ladies’ room.
“Where are you going?” Nick asked crossly.
“Relax, sir. I’m going to relieve myself and get some more coffee,” she replied with a backward glare.
Nick grunted and turned his attention back to the other analysts.
The walk to the ladies’ room didn’t do much to relieve the tension Nick had pumped into her. But as Ruth sat on the toilet and gratefully emptied her bladder, the resulting momentary reduction in stress was welcomed. After making her water, she lingered there in the quiet, sitting on the toilet and letting the data run through her head.
Eric Hicks was clean, she thought to herself. There were no large unexplained payments to his accounts, no travel; he was a paid intern for a government contractor in cryptography prior to being recruited by the CIA, and he had passed all the security checks—the perfect mole.
Her attention moved to a message scratched on the door of her stall: They can hear you.
Who turned you, Joiner?
She tapped her foot on the tile floor, letting the rhythmic echo bounce from the walls and return to her, listening as if they might bring her the answer.
Greg Bailey’s numbered bank account was empty when we checked it, she continued when the tapping echoes brought nothing but more questions. And none of the text messages from his phone were traceable to the source—no contact name.
She found it difficult to believe a seasoned CIA field operative and instructor would change allegiances with a simple wire transfer and some blind text messages. There had to be more to it than that.
She shook her head. “Where is your money, you fucking traitor?” she muttered.
“Pardon?” came another woman’s voice from several stalls down, startling Ruth.
“Nothing,” she replied in mild embarrassment. “Just talking to myself.”
Ruth flushed the toilet, exited her stall without looking in the direction of the other voice, and then quickly washed her hands.
As Ruth turned to leave, the woman in the other stall cleared her throat. Ruth paused at the door.
“You know, sometimes, when you work for an intelligence agency, the answer that’s staring you in the face is the lie.” The other woman’s voice echoed off the tile of the ladies’ room. “Maybe if you stop treating the answers you have as fact, the rest of the information will be more obvious.”
Ruth chewed on her lip, leaning halfway through the door, frozen as ideas began to flood her mind. After a moment, she left.
“Thanks,” she called over her shoulder to the mystery woman.
“Anytime,” echoed the reply as the door slowly groaned shut.
When she returned to the analyst cubicles, she poured yet another cup of coffee and marched confidently over to Nick. There she stared at his back for several beats before speaking.
“We need Scott Wolfe,” she said firmly.
“No,” Nick replied over his shoulder and then returned to his discussion with the other analysts.
“John Temple is in a coma,” she said, raising her voice over their conversation. “Gaines is AWOL. We have no new data from the accounts that TravTech is supposedly ghost hunting, and the only person who seemed able to find any fucking answers in this place has disappeared.”
Nick turned and looked at her, one eyebrow hooked high in an expression she couldn’t immediately decipher.
Shit. Shit, shit, shit, she thought. I pushed him too far.
“What do you want to ask Scott?” Nick asked, oddly withholding his ire at least for the moment.
“Bailey’s account, for starters,” Ruth said, holding firm in her resolve but taking the confrontation down several notches.
“We’ve already looked at the account he gave us,” N
ick replied. “It’s empty.”
“Ghost hunt it,” Ruth said.
Nick tipped his head to the side in unspoken questioning.
“Let’s see if there was ever anything in it to begin with,” she continued.
Nick scoffed. “That much we already know.”
“How do we know? He may have been telling us what we wanted to hear.”
Nick shook his head. “Not a chance.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Ruth replied, mocking his faith in torture to elicit answers. “But, are you so certain that you aren’t willing to verify it?”
Nick opened his mouth to speak but then closed it as doubt slipped over his pointed Greek features.
“Exactly,” said Ruth. “We are basing our entire search for connections on the premise that money was exchanged for sabotage…but we’ve seen no money—no money trail. If that isn’t the motivation behind Bailey’s actions—or if it is, and we can dig the ghosted files out and trace the origins—then we may find the connection we’re missing.”
Nick squinted at her, obviously reflecting on her well-considered argument. After a second, he turned around to face the computer he was standing in front of and brought up a secure terminal window. He punched in some text and hit enter before turning and reengaging with the other three analysts.
Ruth stared at him for a moment longer without moving.
His head turned over his shoulder in her general direction without looking at her. “I’ve sent him a message. We may or may not hear back from him tonight,” he said. Then, as an afterthought, “By the way…John Temple isn’t in a coma anymore.”
“Thank you,” she said with mild satisfaction before returning to her cubicle. “Is he taking visitors yet? John, I mean.”
Nick looked at her as if in passing and nodded his head. Ruth grinned broadly as she sat down in her space. After reopening her windows on Eric Hicks’s background check files, she caught a flash of auburn hair departing from the ladies’ room on the other side of the glass wall. She looked up, catching the woman’s attention with her movement. The redhead smiled and nodded in Ruth’s direction.
My ladies’ room oracle, she thought.
“Who’s that?” Ruth asked no one in particular.
The conversation beside her stopped, and Nick looked up in the direction of the woman. The redheaded woman flashed a crooked smile directly at Nick and then winked; it almost seemed malicious. Ruth chewed the corner of her bottom lip, trying to suppress the smile from the apparent jab at Nick.
“Someone you want to avoid,” Nick replied with a warning growl. “Get back to work.”
“But who is she?” Ruth insisted.
Nick looked at her with agitation and then silently mouthed the words, “Back to work.”
As Nick walked out of the analyst area toward the exit the redhead had disappeared through, Thomas leaned over and whispered to Ruth, “That’s Penny Rhodes.”
Ruth looked at him questioningly.
“She used to be an instructor at the Farm.”
Ruth stared in the direction Rhodes and Nick had disappeared. She tilted her head to the side, curious as she reflected on Nick’s response to her. After a beat she smiled and returned to work.
Tough shit, Horiatis…I like her.
**
6:35 a.m.—Antwerp, Belgium
Kathrin had gotten out of bed almost two hours earlier and had quietly left the house, trying not to wake me. I laid there missing her and trying to piece together the details of her work schedule until I heard the notification chime on my iPhone. I sat up in bed and lazily took my phone from the nightstand, expecting it was Storc with information about the courier I had robbed yesterday. I was surprised when I saw the notification was from one of my scripts, letting me know that a new message had been posted to the CIA’s encrypted blind bulletin board…on the channel for which Nick had given me the encryption key.
I downloaded the message through my proxy string and decrypted it. It read simply: “Find some way to call without giving your position away. Langley x4235.”
“Huh?”
He’s probably just looking for an update. I knew it was too soon for Storc to have the secure transfer to Langley set up yet.
I quickly randomized the dynamic proxy connections and then dialed using the secure VoIP app.
“Data and Research,” came a male voice I didn’t recognize.
“Yeah, I just got a message to call this extension,” I said.
“Who is thi—” began the reply, but then I heard Nick’s voice in the background. “That’s him.”
There was a rustle over the phone and then, “Horiatis.”
“Nick. It’s Sc—”
“Don’t say anything revealing your identity or location. You are Alpha,” he said quickly, clearly upset that I had almost said my name.
He doesn’t trust CIA infrastructure any more either… It’s getting bad.
“I’m putting you on speaker,” he said, and the familiar “tunnel effect” of speakerphone greeted my ears. “Alpha. You are now speaking to me, Paul, Thomas, Roy, Ruth, and Bee.”
“Good morning,” I said.
“Alpha, we’ve hit a dead end on our search for information on Joiner and Bailey,” Ruth said, jumping right in and following Nick’s cue for the name protocol. “We can’t find any connection to the events of last week or even the events six months ago. I was hoping we could get a ghost hunt done on Bailey’s empty, numbered account to at least get us started.”
“Has he been questioned?” I asked.
“Most aggressively,” Nick replied, alluding to enhanced interrogation methods.
“And you didn’t get anything?”
“We got what we have,” Nick replied a little defensively. “An empty numbered account and encrypted texts from an untraceable source.”
I shook my head. That doesn’t add up, I thought. Bailey was a traitor, but I saw pride in his face on a number of occasions when he was training us at the Farm. There had to be more than just a paycheck involved for him to turn against his country—unless I was completely wrong about him.
That thought worried me.
“Is it a US bank?” I asked.
“Yes,” Ruth replied.
I took a deep breath that must have been audible over the phone.
“We have a warrant,” Ruth added quickly. “I wouldn’t want to upset your delicate—”
“Enough,” Nick said cutting her off and, I imagined, glaring at her with those hawkish eyes of his. “We’ve been at this around the clock since the incident at the Farm. We’re all a little on edge.”
The incident, I thought. A polite euphemism for dozens of CIA trainees and instructors being murdered in a criminal attempt to get at me.
“No judgment,” I replied.
“How do you want us to send you the data?” Nick asked.
“Don’t,” I replied. “Data transfer will resolve itself shortly.”
“What the fuck does that mean?” Nick asked.
On edge indeed.
“Expect a call. That’s all I can say right now.”
“When?”
I shook my head, grinning. He was like a kid sometimes. “Soon.”
“It would be—”
“Nick…relax. It’s being taken care of.”
There was a momentary silence at the other end of the line.
“Okay,” Nick said finally, with a little more calm in his voice.
“What about Joiner?” I asked. “Any back trail on him?”
“None,” a male voice said from a little further away than Nick and Ruth had been. It sounded like Thomas, but I couldn’t be sure. “He had all the right checks done on him and even his family check was clean. Whatever his reason for turning, it’s been invisible to us.”
That was frustrating. Eric had fooled me completely. I had no idea he was a mole before Nick’s security plant, Dylan, had put two holes in his head, trying to protect me. That sort of deception wasn’t eas
y to come by. Eric had been well-trained.
“What’s his background?” I asked. “What was he doing before he was recruited by the Agency?”
“He was a data analyst for BRE Cryptography and Security,” Ruth said.
BRE? I thought. Why does that sound familiar?
“Spryte,” I said suddenly as it came to me.
“What?” Nick asked.
“That’s a Spryte Industries subsidiary,” I elaborated.
“Yeah? So?”
“We’ve had questions about their security before,” I said. “That’s too many coincidences to be a coincidence.”
“The fake Mary Browning,” I heard Ruth whisper, presumably to Nick, who hadn’t been privy to the background on the fake Mary Browning’s actions.
Over the summer, a woman who’d claimed to be our liaison with the Agency—Mary Browning—had infiltrated TravTech through the secure entrance, even passing through the biometric scans, which had verified she was the real Mary Browning. We didn’t discover the error until after she had pinned my lead analyst, Jo Ann Zook, to the conference table and tried to force her to reveal information about me.
“It’s worth looking into,” Thomas added.
There was a long pause before Nick spoke again. “Okay. That’s enough to get us started,” he said. “I’m assuming if you had anything significant to share about your investigation you would have done it by now.”
Not really, I thought. But I’m glad you still think so.
“Nothing major,” I lied. “You’ll get a status update soon.”
In reality, it had been a major breakthrough to find the courier network…and after having collected the personal IDs and account cards from the guy’s wallet yesterday, I was actually in possession of a great deal of critical information. But the fewer people who knew it, especially with the doubt surrounding communications, the safer I would be while I continued investigating on my own. Besides, I liked to be sure of my work before handing it over.
“Fine,” Nick said with mild agitation creeping back into his voice; he didn’t believe me. “That’s all we had.”
