by S L Shelton
A microexpression of amusement tugged at the corner of Rhodes’s mouth before she turned and walked back to the front of the class.
“Congratulations to Mr. Farling,” she said as she hit the button to activate the exhaust fans over the workbenches. “He’s the only one who completed the task at hand.”
I just smiled and shook my head.
“Unfortunately, he died in a fiery explosion that also claimed the lives of his team,” she continued, raising her voice over the hum as she turned to me. “On the other hand, Mr. Wolfe succeeded in gaining entry, obtaining the prize, and saving the free world. Sadly, he will now have to fight his way out after making so much noise that the entire staff of the foreign embassy he broke into was made aware of his presence.”
“I didn’t see any smoke coming out of his,” Nick mused with a sly grin, looking at Rhodes with an expression that said, “My boy won, and you know it.”
“Let’s just pray that Mr. Wolfe is lucky enough to survive twenty armed security men and a climb over the compound wall before he and his team are captured or killed.”
“Twelve,” I replied with a crooked grin. “I killed eight on the way in.”
Cautious chuckles burst from some of the other students. I noticed Leyla convulsing in silent laughter, but a glare from Rhodes sobered them all before she turned back to me. An elbow to the ribs from Nick warned me I was crossing the line again.
“That might be so,” Rhodes said. “But will that be any consolation to the families of the team members who died in the noisy escape?”
I shook my head, conceding her point.
“On the other hand,” she said as she hit the kill button on the exhaust fans and walked around the corner of the instructor’s workbench, “after a critical equipment failure, your actions gave you a fighting chance.”
I looked at Paul and winked at him, resulting in a sneer and raised eyebrows from him, as if to say he didn’t care. I knew better.
“Let’s go,” Nick said as he walked toward the door. I stowed my tools back in the drawer beneath the bench and followed him. Before I left the workshop, Rhodes touched me on the shoulder and stopped me. She leaned forward to speak quietly.
“Should I be setting up a watch on Mr. Farling?” she asked.
I shook my head. “Not unless you just want to have medical support standing by… I’ll have booby traps on all my equipment before the day is out.”
She chuckled and a mild, ever-so-slight blush rose to her cheeks. “Nothing lethal, I hope.”
I winked at her and left the room.
Once outside, I jogged up to Nick’s side. “What did you need?”
“Demo training,” he said, referring to the explosives course at Fort Leonard Wood.
“Yeah. My profiling project is done. You can go ahead and schedule it.”
“Okay. You’ll leave tomorrow after the poisons class,” Nick replied. “Make sure your bag is packed before class. We’ll chopper you to Richmond to catch a flight.”
I nodded. “You said ‘two things’,” I reminded him, prompting him to guide me around the corner of the gym by the arm before looking to both sides to see if anyone had noticed.
“John needs you to do something for him,” Nick said in a quiet voice.
I raised an eyebrow. There wasn’t much I could do from the Farm without interrupting my training. “Well?” I asked after several beats. He was obviously still trying to decide something.
“You’ll have to talk to him. Something about bank accounts.”
Gaines’s payoff sheets, I thought. They must have hit a dead end or didn’t get the warrants.
“All I need is a secure phone,” I replied quietly.
He reached into his pocket and withdrew my iPhone, which he had confiscated before we arrived at the Farm. I snatched it from his hands.
“Oh baby, I’ve missed you so much,” I said to the phone, rubbing its screen with my fingertips. “Did you miss me?”
Nick rolled his eyes and turned to leave. “Don’t get caught with that,” he said as he walked away. “It’s two days in the cooler for contraband electronics here.”
I raised the phone up to arm’s length. “Hey, Nick,” I said, prompting him to turn and look at me.
I snapped a picture of him with the barn in the background. He shook his head and walked away again as I immediately began dialing John’s number using the secure connection.
“Temple,” John answered.
“John, it’s Scott,” I said in a low voice as I rolled around the corner and leaned against the cool cinderblock of the building.
“Hey, Scott!” he exclaimed, sounding genuinely happy to hear from me. “How’s camp?”
“Today we learned macramé, and later we’re gonna toast marshmallows and make s’mores.”
John laughed. “Just like the old days,” he said. “Listen. I need your help on something.”
“Shoot.”
“That list of numbers you gave us,” he said, taking on a serious tone. “We can’t do anything with the transactions here in the US.”
“No warrant,” I said, guessing the reason.
“Yeah,” John replied with a little disgust in his tone. “But the sending accounts were in the Caymans.”
“Okay. What do you need from me?”
“Well. The accounts aren’t there anymore,” he replied, “It’s as if they had simply evaporated.”
“Okay,” I replied. “So you need a ghost hunt.”
“Yeah. Do you have a way of doing that from where you are?”
I laughed and took a second to bring my outburst under control before continuing. “No worries. I’m on it.”
“Awesome,” he replied. “You’re the man.”
“It’s billable…right?” I asked, hinting that I would use TravTech assets to deal with the project.
There was a long pause at the other end of the line.
“John?”
“I’m thinking,” he replied.
“Never mind,” I said quietly as the tension in my chest started to tug on me. “I’ve got my answer.”
“Don’t get burned,” John warned.
My chest tightened reflexively as I realized it wasn’t me I’d be exposing if we were caught. “I’ll do my best.”
“One more thing,” he said.
“Sure,” I replied ironically. “I don’t have much going on here.”
“You don’t have to do anything for this one,” he said through a chuckle. “One of our analysts stumbled onto some information regarding your midnight visitors back in July.”
Ruth finally got to my data, I thought.
“And?”
“And it looks like you were right,” John said quietly.
“Awesome. So I’d imagine the warrants are being served as we speak?” I replied.
“Not so much,” John said with a strange edge to his voice. “It seems that my analyst discovered the data through less-than-legal channels. So there’s no way to go to a FISA judge without disclosing how we obtained the information.”
Shit! Damn, damn, damn!
“That’s a shame,” I mumbled as his lesson to me about being smarter with my illegal hacks sank in. “Maybe since she knows where the information is now, she can find a way to duplicate her efforts in a legal manner. You really need to tighten things up there, John. Can’t have people breaking the law, you know.”
There was a moment of silence as I knew he was fighting the urge to blast me…but he couldn’t very well lecture me on obtaining information illegally when he had just finished asking me to hack the Cayman bank accounts connected to US payoffs.
“Thanks,” he replied quietly, swallowing his agitation. He paused briefly before raising his voice again. “Hey! Did you seriously break detention during the waterboarding exercise?”
“Yeah,” I replied sheepishly. “But it took three days. I would’ve suffered a lot less if I’d done it right away.”
“Son of a bitch,” John said,
amused. “I knew I recruited the right guy.”
“You almost lost a couple of instructors,” I replied with a little anger—apparently, I wasn’t as okay with having nearly killed Ray as I had thought. “They shouldn’t be carrying hot weapons in exercises like that.”
“It never occurred to them that a recruit could break free,” he said. “That’s a good thing. You showed them a weakness in the program. Adjustments will be made.”
“Good to know,” I said, brushing off the agitation as best I could.
“Hey!” John said, changing his tone to something more lighthearted. “That network thing you set up at my house in August?”
“What about it?”
“If I want to add more video feeds, do I have to buy another wireless converter for each one, or can I just plug them in?” he asked, referring to the monitoring package I had set up in his house and his super-cool safe room—it was more like a bunker, actually.
“As long as you stick to the same kind of cameras, you don’t have to add anything else,” I replied. “But don’t forget to set the encryption or the wireless signal could be picked up by anyone in the neighborhood.”
“Can’t have that, now, can I?” he replied. “If I need you to walk me through it, I’ll call.”
“Don’t you have people at Langley to do that?” I asked with some amusement. “Why do you need pro-bono work from me?”
“You know how when someone says, ‘I wish I knew someone who could do such and such’?” he asked.
“Yeah,” I chuckled.
“Well, you’re my guy…don’t spoil that for me.”
“Okay, okay. Call me when you have everything installed.”
“Thanks. And let me know if you get anything on the Cayman accounts,” he said. “It’s good to hear from you.”
“You too, John. Take care.”
“Yep,” he said and severed the connection. I immediately dialed Stork’s number at TravTech.
“NOC,” Storc answered.
“Dude!” I exclaimed.
“Scott?”
“Yeah, man. How’s it going?” I asked, smiling, happy just to hear his voice.
“Jesus! I didn’t think I’d be hearing from you for a while.”
“Something’s come up. Your country needs your unique skill set,” I replied with a grin, knowing he would jump at the chance.
“Cool! What’s up?”
“I’m going to read off some numbers,” I said in a low voice. “Don’t put them on the section computers.”
“Okay…ready.”
I gave him the account numbers and transaction numbers I had memorized from the sheet I had stolen from Gaines back in July. Though I remembered the numbers, each time I tried to see them visually the tone in my ears would rise to a distracting level and force me to stop. I was very worried about that. I didn’t ever recall a time in my life when I didn’t have the visual recall of anything I had ever seen, heard, or thought—it was like missing a piece of myself.
“Got ’em,” he said after I’d read off the last set. “What are they for?”
“The transaction numbers are payments made to US bank accounts…you’ll have to leave those alone,” I said, peeking around the corner to make sure I was still clear. I wasn’t sure what I might have missed while distracted by the jet engine screaming in my ears. “But the funding accounts are in the Caymans, and they’ve disappeared.”
“Cool. Ghost hunt,” he replied, matching my quieter voice.
“Start with the IP addresses on the bank transactions,” I continued. “That should give you the physical locations of the banking systems.”
“How ‘gone’ are they?” he asked.
“Let’s just say the request came to us after an exhaustive search,” I replied.
“Understood.”
“Go for the backups,” I added. “Deleting account holder information is one thing, but the average money launderer wouldn’t be able to delete them from institutional backups.”
There was a momentary pause. “So how do you want the results when I finish my ghost hunt?” he asked quietly.
“Hold on to them. I’ll talk to you again soon. You can let me know what you come up with then.”
“Will do,” he replied supportively. “I’m assuming you want me to take the long way around.”
He was referring to using multiple dynamic proxies to cover his data tracks and piggyback Trojans. It was a much slower process, especially when coupled with deep stealth encryption cracking, but it was the only way to steal from high-security systems without being detected.
“Yes, slow and careful,” I replied. “And keep it all off the work systems.”
“You got it. Anything else?”
I thought for a moment, wanting to know how everyone was doing but afraid the question alone would distract me emotionally from my training.
“Nope,” I said with a sad tinge to my voice. “I’m good. Take care of everyone, and do me a favor and don’t let them know I called.”
“You’re the boss,” he replied just as I noticed a figure walking my way.
“Are you having fun?”
“Storc, my friend, I don’t think I’ve ever had this much fun out of bed,” I replied as I moved further away from the corner.
“Nice. Take lots of pictures for your boring friends back in Reston,” he said.
“They frown on picture taking here,” I replied with a chuckle.
“Do your best.”
“I will,” I said as I heard gravel crunch around the corner of the building. “Gotta go. Take it easy.”
“Sure thing. Later.”
I ended the call abruptly and tucked the phone into my pocket. As I turned the corner of the gym, I nearly ran into Paul.
“I didn’t think you had a girlfriend,” he said snidely.
I looked behind me and then into the woods before patting my shirt and pants pockets. “Nope,” I replied with a smug grin. “Still running stag.”
“You’re an arrogant little prick, aren’t you?” he asked with an angry sneer that stretched into a hateful grin.
“Me? Seriously?” I asked innocently. “Everyone loves me. I’m the bomb.” And then I tried to walk past him. He raised his hand and thumped his palm against my chest.
“You—”
He didn’t get to finish. I grabbed his wrist, my thumb pressing the back of his hand as I rotated his arm out and away from his body. The extension on his arm and the twist of the wrist forced him to drop to his knee as his other hand went up in a vain attempt to protect his shoulder.
I lowered my face to within inches of his and whispered into his ear.
“I don’t know what I’ve done to give you such a hard-on for me, but I’ll tell you this in the spirit of building a lasting friendship,” I said quietly. “Don’t ever fucking touch me.”
I stared at him for a moment, watching his eyes close tightly as I nudged his arm a little further behind him. “You feel me?”
He just grimaced.
“Seriously, Paul. I’d like to hear that you understand what I’m saying,” I added with a friendly tone.
He nodded. I released my grip and he immediately began rubbing his shoulder with his other hand. I turned and walked back down the hill, calling over my shoulder as I went. “You should put some ice on that wrist and shoulder, pal. Wouldn’t want your training to suffer.”
Damn it, I thought as I walked away. I needed that confrontation like another hole in my head.
**
4:35 p.m. on Tuesday, October 19th —Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri
My phone was chirping about a hundred feet away, but I couldn’t answer it at that precise moment. In fact, I was almost certain I’d get an ass chewing from the instructor for having it turned on in the blast zone. I was lying on my back under the carcass of an old five-ton-truck. As I strapped plastic explosives to the frame, the sensation of being under there brought back memories of Syria and lying under Adb al Malik Ukil’s wea
pons delivery truck. Ukil, a Turkish arms dealer, had gone missing before the CIA sent the Special Forces Delta team into Mahkan, Syria to capture the stolen nuclear warheads I had helped find… There was still no word on his location.
So many questions were left unresolved from that mission, and I was in no position to search for answers—very frustrating.
John had called me earlier that morning, asking if I could look at some mug shots of mercenaries. He was still trying to identify the man I had killed in Syria who had also tried to kill both of us in an alleyway in Burbank in July. I knew it wasn’t a coincidence.
One of the strips of explosive dropped onto my chest from the axle above me.
“Shit,” I muttered as my chest contracted. “Stay focused, Scott.”
“Everything okay under there?” came the voice of the instructor from the side of the vehicle, his southern twang twisting each word until it was almost comical. For a brief instant, I wondered if he was exaggerating his pronunciation on purpose.
“Yeah,” I replied, pressing the strip back into place and wrapping it with cotton tape. “Bad angle.”
“At least you aren’t underwater,” he replied.
I shook my head as another unwelcome thought entered my mind. The instructor may have thought he was being supportive, but according to Nick, I would have to do this underwater before my training was complete—though not with the Army. That particular course would be in Norfolk, Virginia, with the SEALs.
Norfolk, I thought. I wonder how Mark Gaines is doing in the brig there?
I dropped my pliers on the ground.
Goddamn it, Scott. Focus.
As I reached around blindly to find them, a ringing sound surfaced in my right ear accompanied by a sharp pain behind my eye.
There’s a reason you are having difficulty focusing, my other voice chimed in through the squeal.
I haven’t heard from you in a while, I thought in reply. No offense, but let’s talk later. That roar in my ear and the pain are a little distracting.
It will get better, my schizophrenic hitchhiker reassured me.
“That’s good to know,” I muttered as the ringing subsided.
“What’s that?” the instructor called to me.
