by S L Shelton
“Wait,” I said, preempting a rude disconnect. “How’s John?”
I heard the phone come off speaker.
“He’s awake and taking visitors,” Nick said in a hushed voice. “He still looks like shit, but the doctor says he’s on the mend.”
“That’s great,” I replied. “Any word on how long before he’s up and around again?”
“He won’t be up at all,” Nick said with a hint of anger in his tone. “His spine was permanently damaged. The doctors have pretty much confirmed he’ll never walk again.”
A flood of grief washed over me as I tried to adjust my perceptions about the man who had brought me into the CIA. John is a cripple. That was hard to wrap my head around.
“On a positive note, though, the damage was isolated, so he should be able to return home in a few weeks,” Nick added.
“That’s good, at least.”
“Yeah,” Nick said with remorse.
Nick might have been a classic, badass CIA operator, but I knew he felt deeply. The fact that he’d reveal any real emotion was a sign of trust.
“Any word on the guys who did it,” I asked, “…or the ones that hit the Farm?”
“Nothing,” he said. “Satellite timing, tower logs, equipment traces…they all come back negative. They had it timed to the second and covered all their bases.”
“Well, not all their bases,” I replied. “We inflicted pretty heavy casualties on them…what about the helicopter they left in flames on the parade field at Peary?”
“It was one of ours,” Nick replied. “One of the attack birds we gave to Afghani National Defense.”
“I hope they got a good price for it,” I sniped.
“Not fucking likely,” Nick muttered with such exhaustion that I could almost see the bags under his eyes through the phone.
“How are you holding up, pal?” I asked.
“Don’t you fucking worry about me, you little shit. Finish your work and get your ass back here as soon as you can,” he replied sharply.
And the tender moment is over.
“If you miss me, just say so. No need to beat around the bush.”
“Keep it up, smart guy,” Nick replied.
“Go on…I know you want to.”
Silence.
“Say, ‘I miss you Alpha’,” I prodded.
“At some point we’ll see each other again,” he replied, a threat in his tone.
“And what? You’re gonna kick my ass?”
There was a long silence.
“It was pointless giving you a code name for this call,” he said, but I could hear the smile on his face. “No one is annoying as you are. That alone would give you away.”
“That hurts, Nick. It really hurts,” I replied in mock offense. “I may have to take the day off to recover.”
“You’ll get over it.”
“Tell John I said hi next time you see him,” I replied, grinning at the predictable change of demeanor. “I’ll bring him a T-shirt or something.”
“Yep. Stay safe, you annoying little prick,” Nick said and then ended the call without a good-bye.
I chuckled and shook my head. “What an asshole.”
Since I was up, I decided to check for any messages from Storc. Following my own security protocol of not using the same SIM card twice after being in contact with Langley, I popped it out before replacing it with a fresh one. Only then did I re-connect with my network of proxy servers. I found a new message and a data package from Storc:
The courier is with a legitimate company (Prosé Service Exécutifs) but the number of contracts dropped several months ago to three or four from a couple hundred. Oddly, their invoicing tripled at the same time and revenue jumped…according to their bookkeeper’s computer records anyway.
The guy whose wallet you stole has only been with the company for seven months, along with three others who were hired at the same time…again, according to the bookkeeper’s records. They are VERY well paid for couriers—about $275K a year plus bonuses.
I’ll get you the rest of the info on the accounts as soon as I crack the bank firewalls. You were right. They are almost all new numbers.
Be Careful,
S.
As soon as I finished reading the note, I opened the data file. It contained information on the company, its employees, vehicles registered to the firm, invoice dates and amounts, and company phone numbers. Storc had even included the Mac address for the bookkeeper’s computer that he had hacked with a comment next to it: Still working on cracking the company systems, I’ll update soon.
Fresh leads, brick and mortar locations, real live people… finally!
“You are the man,” I muttered before sending a reply.
S,
You rock. Backdoor on the PSE system would be nice, but the invoiced customers are now top priority. Find out who they are. Also, that encryption key I mentioned that you need to deliver…best do it soon. Our buddies need another ghost hunt—not on TT servers. Keep it locked down tight.
You da man,
S.
I sent the message and quickly dressed for the day. When I walked into the kitchen, I found a key and a note from Kathrin on the table: “Had an early run to make. I hope I didn’t wake you. XO Gretle.”
I noted that she had spelled “Gretel” the proper German way… It made me smile. I guess she had felt bad that I’d waited in the cold for her the night before—I now had my own front door key. That, at least, was a show of faith on her part. I just wish I could get her to come clean about what she did for a living before my imagination began filling in the blanks.
Who am I kidding? I thought. My imagination has already filled in the blanks.
After pulling some cold roast beef out of the fridge and downing it with some orange juice, I went to the bedroom and pulled my Glock from the metal briefcase in the closet. Now that I had a lead on the couriers, I was going to follow it. There was no need for me to wait on Storc to dig up more background on them.
On my way out the door, I grabbed a lightweight jacket and pulled it over my holster. After exiting the building, I wished I hadn’t given my heavy wool coat away yesterday. The biting cold froze the hairs in my nose before the door closed. I pulled my scarf tighter around my face as I jogged toward my car.
Just as the sun started to peek over the buildings and cast long, early morning shadows on the river, I pulled my rented Audi onto the highway headed toward Lille, France—home of Prosé Service Exécutifs…the couriers.
When I arrived in Lille, I parked my car a block away from Prose’s offices. It was still rather early in the workday, so I ditched the car for a while to make a slow walk around the building. It was a corner building, and judging by the entry placard, Prose appeared to occupy all three floors of the post-war block and stucco structure.
As I meandered by the front entrance, I glanced in and noticed the guard at the front desk was already at work. It was too late in the morning to break in and check around anyway, but if they had ’round the clock security, it would be a challenge even in the dark of night.
Fortunately, I was more interested in where the couriers were going than what they had inside their offices. I could rely on Storc to hack the company systems. I wanted to know about the other deposits and withdrawals…the ones not included in the handful of account records we had.
After strolling casually around the corner, I found the company parking area. Contained within were several black sedans like the one I had seen the day before. All were the same make, model, and year. The iron fence and gate around the enclosure suggested that security was important to these people. I discreetly snapped a picture of their license tags as I walked by.
Once at the end of the lot, I continued across the street and found a café. I ducked in and ordered a large coffee and a bag of ham sandwiches on fresh bread as I warmed myself. The sweatshirt, jacket, and scarf I was wearing weren’t doing much to keep me warm. If I got much colder, I’d have to pull t
he second sweatshirt out of my bag and double up.
Western Europe was just catching the tail end of a polar oscillation that had created record lows just last month—hundreds of people had died from exposure. Thankfully, the biting cold seemed to be moving out, and things would get more normal in a week or two, but at the moment, I would have given just about anything for that wool coat I had given away.
As soon as my hands were warm, I took my coffee and continued around the block, making a full circle back to my car. I climbed in and set my cup between my legs to warm my thighs before retrieving my iPad from my canvas messenger bag—the bag that Kathrin had given me at our first meeting. Once logged in, I began a fast hack of the French traffic grid camera network.
I was actually surprised at how difficult the network was to break into—it took me a full three minutes. I smiled as I pulled up the terminal screen and discovered that “English” was an option for interface language.
“That’s damned thoughtful of you,” I muttered to the designers of the system.
The flashing cursor popped up in the search box, and I entered the first license plate number. After a moment of the obligatory “please wait…loading” screen, I was rewarded with a list of camera captures for the license number, listed in chronological order. I smiled and took a sip of coffee before exporting the data. After it spooled into my spreadsheet, I downloaded the other license plates using the same search.
I noticed movement out of my peripheral vision and looked up to see a couple of black-suited men walking through the main entrance of the courier company building.
“Hmm…early hours,” I muttered before returning my attention to my download. “I guess it’s worth the sacrifice for a quarter of million bucks a year.”
Once all the files were loaded into my spreadsheet matrix, I began constructing a pivot table and a mapping algorithm as a template for the data. A surge of impatience and frustration began to flush my face, thinking about how simple this would have been to do in my head only six months ago…before my skull got Tased by the CIA instructors trying to fake my abduction.
The damage to my brain, unbeknownst to them, had wrecked an enhancement my father had inadvertently bestowed on me when I was eight years old. It was the same government-funded enhancement program that had quite possibly gotten him murdered—or so I’d discovered over the past few months.
The sound of conversations around me started to bubble into my consciousness, prompting me to look up. I looked around in all directions and saw only light morning sidewalk traffic.
“Shit,” I muttered. So it’s like that, is it? First I lose my gifts, and now I start hearing voices like my dad did? Is this how it started for him too?
No answer from my onboard schizophrenic co-pilot, Wolf.
I went back to work on my data. “At your leisure,” I muttered. “No rush. Take your time. But when you get a chance, do you think you could tell me what the hell is going on with my head?”
Once I had finished constructing the template for the traffic data, I loaded all the files into it and superimposed the points on my map program. I used a different colored line of travel for each vehicle. It instantly showed me each car’s path of travel for the past month.
“Bingo,” I said as I sat back and watched the street get busier.
I put the car into gear and drove forward one more block, stopping cross corner from the Prosé parking compound so I could see them as they left. There I watched in my rearview mirror for nearly an hour before the gate rolled aside and vehicles started coming out.
I checked each license plate against the map data as they exited. The third vehicle out of the compound was the vehicle belonging to the men who had chased me through the streets of Calais yesterday. I checked their routes on my iPad before opting to let them pass.
The sixth car out of the lot turned in my direction and then drove past. I looked down at the map and noticed a much smaller number of camera captures for that license plate—and a much more random pattern of travel. Among their trips out of town were several in the direction of Bruges.
There are my Bruges couriers, I thought as a smile involuntarily spread across my face.
“Let’s see where you’re off to,” I muttered before putting my car into gear, smoothly entering traffic several car lengths behind the black sedan.
As we wove through traffic toward the outskirts of the city, I began to hear a dull tone in my right ear, like tinnitus except more painful. The stabbing pain behind my eyes began to build almost immediately.
You should postpone operations until we can deal with the issue of your brain damage, my troublesome inner voice—Wolf—said through the noise. Finally!
I closed my eye tightly against the migraine that was forming. “It’s about fucking time you made an appearance,” I replied, agitated.
I was saving you the discomfort of engaging until there was something important to say, Wolf replied.
“I’m in the middle of a surveillance project. What’s so important?” I asked as I followed the car up an entry ramp toward the highway.
I found depth perception hard to gage with one eye closed, so I opened it briefly to see I was a bit too close. I let several cars pass in front of me and then pressed my right eye closed again, trying to deal with the harsh throb that had developed.
You aren’t analyzing all the details around you, Wolf said. It didn’t even register that one of the last sedans out of Prosé is now behind you.
“Shit,” I muttered as my attention snapped up to the rearview mirror.
It was possible that they were just on the same course as the sedan I was following. I had to find out if I was blown. I took the next exit and watched carefully in my rearview as the trailing car passed me, continuing down the highway.
I breathed out my anxiety as I reached the top of the ramp, pausing a second to cross traffic.
“Thanks,” I whispered to Wolf before crossing the street and continuing back down to the highway behind the second sedan.
You are missing details that could get you killed, Wolf replied.
“Get my head fixed then,” I said. “Or at least get the crowd noises out of my ears.”
Those aren’t crowd noises…they are memories, being rerouted in an attempt to repair the scarring from the Taser attack.
The pain in my eye had reached a level that was impossible to bear. “I have to work,” I snapped. “Get in there and fix it or at least put it back the way it’s supposed to be—I’m not exactly in a place to stop and have a chat… I’m following a lead.”
More caution, Wolf said, fading out. Your tools aren’t helping you. You have to compensate.
“Tell me something I don’t know,” I muttered as the tone began to recede.
By the time my headache had disappeared completely, the second sedan had exited the highway. I watched it as it drifted up the ramp and then turned right, away from me. As I passed under the overpass, I began searching my rearview to be sure it hadn’t just pulled a maneuver on me the way I had on him. Three miles later, I relaxed and refocused on the first sedan, the original target, which was now much further ahead but still in sight.
“Compensate,” I said to myself. “Compensate.”
For nearly an hour, I drifted at a respectable distance from the courier’s sedan, headed north. When we entered Bruges, Belgium, my focus sharpened.
Here we go, I thought. Show me something interesting, guys.
If anyone were going to lead me to the operational use of the funds, it would be these guys. Bruges had been the only banking city on our list that didn’t have regularly scheduled deposits and withdrawals. It looked to me as if this money was accessed when it was needed…not just to hide the origins.
My fingers tightened around the wheel as anticipation brought my heart rate up. Winding through the busy streets of Bruges, I lost sight of them. A couple of frantic moments later, I spotted them turning a block ahead.
“Whew.”
&
nbsp; When I turned the corner, I found the sedan had stopped in front of a bank. Crossing lanes quickly, I drove into the garage that overlooked the bank half a block away. After racing to the second level of the parking structure, I parked and got out of my car.
I could see them perfectly. The concrete guardrail was tall enough to conceal my car—a good thing when it had already trailed them halfway across Belgium. I leaned on the ledge and reached into my shirt pocket under my blue zip-up hoodie before pulling out a pack of cigarettes. I clumsily pounded it into my palm as I watched two of the couriers get out of the sedan. The driver remained inside as the other two went around to the trunk.
It took me two tries to find the pull cord to open the cigarettes without looking. Not being a smoker, the rituals involved were foreign to me. But I had learned to mimic them believably at the Farm.
There were a few credible reasons to hang around in public, staring blankly at people or watching traffic—smoking was one.
There was a society-wide “pass” for sitting and staring when you had a lit cigarette hanging out of your mouth. Homeless people, bouncers (or other security-related professionals), and salesmen also got the mental shrug when caught staring. But smoking was easier to slip on and off than a homeless disguise, and it would have been hard to convince anyone I was homeless while driving an Audi…that would draw attention, not deflect it.
I lit the cigarette with the Zippo lighter I had purchased at a smoke shop at the airport in Paris when I had procured my rental car. I had to stifle a gasp as the first puff nearly choked me. Still, I had to inhale…you can visually tell the difference between smoke that’s inhaled and smoke that’s just puffed. Once the first few drags had paralyzed the upper cilia in my lungs, I leaned on the railing of the parking structure as if on a leisurely smoke break. I glanced down, as if in passing, at the two men as one of them pulled two suitcases from the trunk. Judging by the way he maneuvered them, I assumed they were empty.
I quickly sent Storc a message, telling him to check the accounts at that bank to see if any of our listed numbers showed a withdrawal around this time frame. I knew it was still early in Virginia, but I was pleasantly surprised when I got a response a few moments later.
