Harbinger

by S L Shelton

  “How can you be sure?” Nick asked, unbelieving.

  “Do you trust me?” John asked.

  Nick closed one eye and screwed his face up as if he had just sucked on a lemon.

  “Okay…fair enough,” John said with a chuckle. “Do you trust that I would never betray you, the Agency, or my country?”

  “Yes,” Nick said firmly.

  “Then trust me when I say you can trust Penny Rhodes,” he said. “And you have to convince Scott…if that’s why he’s not sending you information anymore.”

  “That ship may have sailed,” Nick said. “I got a message from him yesterday saying he’d been chased out of his roost and was going off the grid.”

  “Chased out?”

  “His words were: his ‘safe place got hit’,” Nick said in barely a whisper.

  A crease formed in John’s brow, rising almost to his short-clipped, graying hair.

  “I don’t think it’s a coincidence that one of our black sites in Antwerp was hit the night before,” Nick added. “We lost a couple of good people. And then there was some sort of shootout the next morning along the riverfront.”

  “But he communicated with you after that?”

  “Only to tell me he wasn’t going to be communicating anymore for a while,” Nick replied. “He said the timing was odd…and I’m certain he was referring to Penny showing up in the section.”

  John shook his head. “Don’t let him go off the grid,” John said. “He’s too used to doing things on his own. If you let him get away with it, you’ll never get him reined in.”

  “John, I suck at this management shit,” Nick replied, agitated. “I was never any good at being subtle, and I can’t even kick his ass anymore. You need to convince Burgess to put me out there so I can find Scott and keep an eye on him.”

  John smiled almost patronizingly. “You’d just slow him down,” he said. “No offense, but Scott moves a hundred miles an hour in neutral.”

  “That’s what I mean!” Nick said, raising his voice more than he had intended. “How the fuck are we supposed to manage what he brings in if he’s bringing it in faster than we can collect it and keeping half of it to himself?”

  John shook his head. “You’ll never get it all,” he said. “But you have to get him used to reporting the important stuff…the key stuff that will affect the operation.”

  Nick looked down at his hands and shook his head. “How the hell am I supposed to do that?”

  John shrugged. “If it makes you feel any better, I’m still trying to figure that out too.”

  Nick laughed. “No! It doesn’t. I was hoping you’d have the answer.”

  John chuckled and then winced in pain before rolling on his back.

  Nick shot him a worried glare. “You need the nurse or something?” he asked.

  John shook his head. “I’m fine… Pain in my legs that I’m not supposed to feel anymore.”

  “So you’re getting feeling back?” Nick asked hopefully.

  “No… Doc says it’s normal. It’s an echo from the last thing I felt,” John said. “It sucks sweaty balls that it was shrapnel and not a woman. I could be happy if that’s what I kept feeling over and over.”

  Nick chuckled uncomfortably. “I’m sorry,” he said sincerely. “I shouldn’t have come out.”

  “I’m fine,” John said, flustered as he adjusted himself in bed. “It’s fine.”

  “Are you seriously considering coming back to work?” Nick asked. “The old man seems to think he’s holding your slot open for you.”

  John sighed. “I wouldn’t know what else to do,” he said, his face pulling down in seemingly spontaneous exhaustion. “I’m afraid if I don’t, I’ll lie in bed all day until one day the neighbors have to call the police to investigate the corpse smell coming from next door.”

  Nick shook his head. “That’s a lot to recover from.”

  “Bullshit,” John muttered. “There have been plenty of guys over the years that I’ve sent off to do the country’s dirty work who have come home in far worse shape than this…or not come back at all.”

  Nick shot him an uncomfortable look.

  “Don’t give me that sad look,” John snapped. “I’ll slap the shit out of you.”

  Nick grinned.

  “It’s just my legs,” John continued. “Everything else works fine—well, almost everything.”

  Nick shifted uncomfortably again and then decided to change the subject. “So you really think I can trust Penny Rhodes?” Nick asked after a moment of silence.

  “Count on it,” John said. “She’s a good egg.”

  Nick nodded and stared down at his clasped fingers for a few beats before nodding. “Alright,” he said finally. “If Scott pops his head back up on the radar, I’ll do my best to calm his fears and try to get him to open up.”

  “Talk to the TravTech people,” John added. “He respects them more than he respects us.”

  “They won’t give us anything without his say so.”

  “No,” John replied, shaking his head. “Don’t pump them for information… Let them know how worried you are about him. Be honest.”

  Nick looked at John, measuring his comment.

  “And whatever you do, don’t make Scott feel like you are trying to maneuver him,” he said as an afterthought. “If you try to bully him or manipulate him, he’ll just clam up. I learned that the hard way.”

  “Well, Jesus Christ,” Nick said, shaking his head after a breathy scoff. “If you can’t finesse him, how the hell does Burgess expect me to?”

  John smiled. “The director obviously has faith in you or he wouldn’t have put you in charge,” he said with a sincere smile. “And honestly, he wouldn’t have done it if there wasn’t good cause.”

  “If you say so,” Nick muttered. “Just hurry your ass up and get back to work. I’m going to suffocate in that damned office.”

  John nodded. “I’m working on it,” he said. “In the meantime, just try to hold it together until we can find those upstream fund sources.”

  Nick nodded as he rose to leave. “I’ll do my best.” He turned toward the door.

  “And next time you come to visit, bring me some food,” John said to Nick’s back. “I’m dying for a good burger and onion rings.”

  Nick turned. “Sorry, boss. If it’s going to slow down your recovery, I’m not gonna be a party to it.” He winked.

  “Then get the fuck outta here,” John said with a grin.

  “See ya in a few days,” Nick said and then left.

  As he walked down the hall, the comfort he had gained talking with John dissipated rapidly. How the hell am I supposed to make you trust us, Scott, when I don’t even trust us?

  **

  7:15 p.m.—Zurich, Switzerland

  “Do you still have the terminal port cable and adapter?” I asked Kathrin as I packed my bag, preparing to leave the hotel.

  “It’s in the car with the camera,” Kathrin yelled from the bathroom.

  I grunted in response. I was ecstatically happy that neither my program nor our entrance into Loeff’s office had been detected. It had been a tense couple of hours after I had logged back into the security server in her building and watched her run back up to her office. I thought I was going to have a stroke when the security men showed up.

  “Is my shaving bag in there?” I asked through the bathroom door.

  Kathrin came out in her trademark army pants and a white T-shirt, my shaving bag dangling from the tip of her finger. “Relax,” she said.

  I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. I stared at her for a second before grabbing my kit from her. “Okay…I’m calm. Now let’s get the hell out of here.”

  She chuckled as she returned to the bathroom and closed the door.

  We had dodged a bullet on Loeff’s office. If she hadn’t already connected her phone to her computer before she left the first time, transferring my virus to her Samsung, I wouldn’t have known she was calling a security s
pecialist. I was able to check her call log and reverse look up the number—Merrik Schmidt, Private Investigations.

  When they left the building, followed a few minutes later by Frau Loeff, I felt like I had hit the lottery. A quick query to my virus after they had left confirmed they had not detected it and that it was still feeding information down a long, slow, winding road of proxies to Storc.

  As far as I was concerned, I had found the missing piece of the puzzle for the upstream accounts, and now I could focus on finding the missiles. We were heading back to Brussels. Kathrin wasn’t aware of it yet, but I was going to be temporarily parting ways with her—I didn’t want her anywhere near Harbinger, his mercenaries, or those weapons.

  Despite her incredible proficiency at self-defense and shooting—which was far greater than any surveillance techs I had met through the CIA—she wasn’t trained as a covert operator. There was no way I was going to put her in the line of fire with those guys, no matter how much she protested. I suspected her Uncle Benjamin would be pleased, though.

  “Do you have any cash left from the purchases?” I asked. “I’m down to the last three thousand I came with.”

  She opened the door. “A few hundred,” she said, leaning halfway through. “But I have access to funds. No need to worry.”

  I nodded. “Okay.”

  I wasn’t worried. But I’d need to be in contact with Nick if I wanted more funds. I doubted Kathrin would give me access to her stash after I dropped her at the front door of the Israeli Embassy, and there was no way I was going to use the credit cards from my new ID—the Noble ID. I’d learned my lesson with the North ID.

  The whole fiasco with the escape from Harbinger at the Frankfurt Airport made me remember the Special Ops credo: Two is one, one is none. And the attack on Kathrin’s safe house drove it home with a sledgehammer: Don’t burn your only escape ID using it on an Op.

  I would have to arrange for some travel IDs once we were back in Brussels.

  Once Kathrin finished packing, I sat on the edge of the bed and pulled up my phone-tracking app, letting fresh data stream in from Storc’s server. Bellos still hadn’t used his phone since yesterday. It was turning out not to be the great lead I had hoped it would be.

  “Come on,” Kathrin insisted as she made a quick sweep of the room. “You were the one who wanted to get out of here.”

  I nodded and closed my devices down before we both wiped down any surfaces we might have touched…just in case. We left the hotel by eight o’clock and were on our way to Basel, Switzerland, to spend the night with Kathrin’s friends, Hülya and Maurice, in order to break up the long drive back to Brussels.

  We arrived in Basel shortly before ten. Kathrin pulled up to a charming apartment complex surrounded on two sides by woods.

  “Cute town for a stopover,” I said with a grin.

  “I know I don’t have to tell you, but they are unaware of my association with Mossad,” she whispered as we climbed the stairs.

  “So I should avoid referring to you as Agent 99 while we’re here,” I muttered.

  She shot me a confused look, obviously not getting the reference to Get Smart. I just shook my head. “Never mind. It’s not important.”

  Our host and hostess greeted Kathrin warmly, hugging and chatting her up in German for several seconds before even acknowledging my presence.

  The man greeted me in German. I understood but didn’t want to give him the impression I was a native speaker, so I confessed my language handicap up front.

  “I’m sorry. I speak very little German,” I replied to his greeting, exaggerating my lack of understanding.

  “Ah. You speak English!” he said, strangely, with a French accent.

  “Yes. I confess,” I said. “I’m American.”

  “I used to live in the US,” he said, smiling broadly. “Welcome to Switzerland.” He ushered us into the house.

  Kathrin put her bags on the floor and turned to our guests. “Maurice and Hülya, I wish to introduce you to Scott. Scott, these are my dear, dear friends, Maurice and Hülya.” Maurice reached to shake my hand and Hülya leaned in to hug me. A genuinely sincere gesture. They seemed very warm. It was a nice change of pace.

  “It is very much pleasure to meet you,” Hülya said in awkward English. “Let me take your lung-age to the bedroom.” She paused halfway to picking up Kathrin’s bag and then looked at her with a worried expression. “Es tut mir leid. Wir haben nur ein Gästezimmer.”

  Kathrin laughed. “It’s okay. We are together,” she said with a blush.

  I stifled a chuckle of my own before Kathrin whispered, “They only have one guest room.”

  I nodded my understanding, smiling.

  Maurice directed me to sit in the living room. “So where did you come from? Tonight, I mean,” he said as he offered me a beer. I graciously accepted.

  “We just passed through Zurich. I’m on holiday, but I had some business to take care of there,” I replied, then took a long tug on the beer. It was a very tasty dark with a hint of chocolate.

  “Ah. What business do you do?” he asked.

  “I’m in security software. Mostly travel-related,” I replied.

  “Oh. I’m in software as well. I’m a developer,” he replied proudly. Kathrin had told me earlier that Maurice was a very talented programmer.

  We continued to chat about computers and software briefly, but his accent kept distracting me. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to interrupt, but your accent. It sounds French, but not quite.”

  He laughed. “It’s complicated,” he replied. “I am native French Canadian, Scottish,” he said with a broad smile.

  Confused, I pried further. “How is one simultaneously a native French Canadian and native Scottish?”

  “No. You misunderstand. I am Native American from Quebec, with a bit of Scottish blood as well,” he said, grinning widely.

  “And you used to live in the US, but now you live in Switzerland,” I added.

  “Yes. Married to a Turkish wife,” he said, and then burst out laughing. It was a hearty, genuine laugh that seemed to be born from sheer joy. It was so contagious I began to laugh as well. Despite my mild attempt to temper it, my boisterous outburst became a belly laugh to match his.

  “If your children don’t end up working for the United Nations, I would be very surprised,” I replied through a chuckle as the spasms diminished.

  Just then my phone chimed, letting me know I had a secure text waiting for me.

  “Sorry,” I said, standing. “I have to respond to this.”

  I heard as I left the room that Hülya was taking my break as an opportunity to excuse herself. She had to rise very early for work and it was well past her bedtime.

  The message from Storc was simple: “Call me.”

  I linked up our proxies and did just that. He answered on the first ring.

  “What’s this?” he asked without a hello.

  “You mean the feed I started for you?”

  “Yeah,” he replied. “It looks like a hard drive dump.”

  “It is,” I said. “From the person we think is managing the upstream funds and transfers.”

  There was a brief silence from Storc as the sound of clicking keys increased—he was checking the data.

  “You hacked his system?”

  “Her system…and yes.”

  “That’s just so cool,” he muttered as the sound of fingers clacking a keyboard filled my earpiece. I guessed he was hex reading every packet of data as it flowed to him. “Do you know how much work you just saved me?”

  “A bit, probably,” I replied, grinning.

  “Why’s it going so slow?” he asked but before I could answer, he did so himself. “Oh…never mind. I see you used the slow road proxies. Stealthy.”

  “Yep,” I said. “And it’s a good thing too. She already had someone in to look at the system. If it hadn’t been slow dripping the data, they might have discovered it.”

  “Someone scanned the sy
stem and didn’t find it?”

  I smiled at the robust and stealthy nature of my virus. “Yeah…who’s da man?”

  “You da man,” Storc said as if in passing. “Any idea how deep into the drive the account data is?”

  “No clue, pal,” I replied. “It’s doing a sector by sector copy so you can see any deleted files as well. But I’ll guarantee it’ll be faster than hacking into a bank.”

  He chuckled. “No shit.”

  “You don’t have to babysit it,” I offered, knowing he would anyway. “I’m holding off on any further action with this until you get something…positive or negative.”

  “So you’re coming back?”

  “No,” I replied quickly. “I have a related project I have to work on now.”

  “When was the last time you had a day off?” he asked.

  I was about to say “Sunday,” but then realized a gunfight and a car chase probably counted as work. “It’s been a while.”

  “Then why don’t you take some down time,” Stork said, “before you go balls deep into another Op.”

  I laughed. “I think the company would prefer me to do something about this other thing.”

  “That reminds me. Your big brother said he really needs you to get in touch with him,” Storc said.

  “I’m assuming you mean Spartan? I have so many brothers these days.”

  “Yeah,” Storc replied. “Him.”

  “Is he pressuring you to come up off the data?” I asked.

  “No…not anymore,” Storc said. “He really just seems to be worried about you.”

  “I’m sure it’s his most pressing concern,” I replied with a sarcastic edge.

  “I got the impression he’s actually really worried about you being out there on your own,” Storc said. “Maybe you should call him.”

  I breathed in deeply and let it out slowly.

  “He said to say ‘working on your own makes you a smaller target but it also makes you vulnerable’,” Storc added before I could reply.

  That son of a bitch. Nick is working me through my friends now, I thought.

  “Just remember who he works for before you start assuming the sincerity of anything he says,” I replied. “I like Spartan as much as any of them. But…”