by James Hunt
Bryce folded his hands in his lap. “Good morning to you as well.”
Grace flipped open the first page, revealing photographs of a man and a woman, both with beach-blond hair and near-albino skin and nearly identical facial features. “Roman Lahftz and Mabel Lahftz were skilled hackers within the black hat community. They were a part of WikiLeaks and helped Edward Snowden with his escape from the U.S. They were found dead in an abandoned building, burned alive. Who owned the building, you ask?” She flipped another page. “Taylor Grimes.”
“So Grimes recruited them or kidnapped them?”
“Based on their profile it could be both. They would have been attracted to the type of technology that Grimes was touting them with, and with Grimes’s skill set as a former CIA field agent it would have provided him the capacity to take two five-foot-nothing, one-hundred-pound twins out of their apartment without anyone seeing.”
“How’s it feel to be right?” Bryce asked.
Grace smiled. “Pretty good.”
She had certainly come into her own over the past year, and he couldn’t have been more proud of all she accomplished. Moving from Mack’s secretary to psyche profiler wasn’t an easy task. Though, he had to admit that because of her new skill set he didn’t get away with much. Especially when he tried to lie. “Did you finish the assessment on Grimes?”
“Yeah.” Grace slapped another folder onto the desk. “He’s a piece of work.”
Bryce opened it up and examined the notes. “He was Special Forces for the Army?”
“Green Beret,” Grace answered. “And he was damn good, too. Eight commendations and the Silver Star. This guy knows how to handle himself.”
Bryce flipped over to the second then the third page. “Joined the CIA after an honorable discharge from the Army. Started as a field agent and worked his way up to deputy director.” He quickly slammed the folder shut and tossed it back onto the desk. “During his time at the CIA, he didn’t have one complaint filed against him, not one investigation of any wrongdoing. This guy was squeaky clean. Why would he do this now?”
Grace leaned her hip on the edge of Bryce’s desk and crossed her arms over her chest. “He never married, no real family connections. His life has been dedicated to the service of the country.” She pressed her forefinger on top of the folder. “This guy bleeds red, white, and blue. And from the communications I looked at between him and Mallory, he was not a fan of the GSF.”
“No surprise there,” Bryce said. After the Global Power Crisis two years ago, the GSF’s complete anonymity was blown. Grimes and a handful of others had discovered the GSF existed, and the poster boy for American Imperialism didn’t want to submit to a superior agency. Though, he didn’t hate the GSF enough to disobey his orders to keep his mouth shut. But it appeared that he’d finally taken about as much as he could handle.
“The only reason he would do this is because he thinks he’s helping the country somehow,” Grace said. “Trust me, in his mind, he still thinks he’s doing his job.”
“He sounds just as stubborn as Sarah,” Bryce mumbled.
“What do you have?” Grace asked.
“There wasn’t much on him from the CIA servers. Your standard performance reviews and personal information. We’ve already sent agents to his home address. We haven’t gotten the full report on their sweeps yet, but I imagine they won’t find anything he didn’t want them to in the first place.”
The monitors flashed the hundreds of documents the satellite was filtering through, searching for any key words he programmed into the code, but in the end, it wasn’t Bryce or the sophisticated satellite that caught the page, it was Grace. “Whoa, did you see that?” She pointed to the top left screen. “Go back a couple.”
Bryce stopped the program and manually pulled up the document. The print across the top was marked as a level above classified and was part of the fresh pack of documents that Mack had sent over from Langley. “This is a memo about Global Power.”
Grace leaned forward, her face scrunched up in the cute way it always was whenever the wheels started to turn. “Global Power was the software that could manipulate energy waves, right?”
“Yeah, from anywhere in the world.” Bryce swiveled in his chair, the content of the screens being wiped clean and replaced with a massive line of code. “He would have had access to those old files through his clearance with the CIA. It could be how Grimes is controlling the nuclear arsenals.” He studied it as quickly as he could, the lines filtering over the monitors like a scene from The Matrix. “I think we’ve got a starting point.”
***
The masses of New York funneled themselves down the sidewalks of downtown Manhattan. Millions of people going about their day, oblivious to what was just behind the curtain none of them dared pull back. God forbid they look up from their smartphones and think about something other than themselves for a few minutes. Though with the communication device glued to the inside of her ear at all times, Sarah didn’t have much room to talk. “I’ll swing by when I can.”
“If you can’t make it this week it’s okay,” Becca said. “It’s not like we won’t see you next week.”
Considering what was heading their way, Sarah wasn’t so sure about that. “It’s just been busy at work. Give the kids a kiss for me?”
“I will. Be careful out there, Sarah.”
“You know me.”
“I know. That’s why I said it.”
Sarah smiled, and the call ended. She didn’t like skipping dinners with the only family she had left. And that had taken on new meaning when her brother passed two years ago. A sobering fact that still haunted her to this day. She had come a long way since then, and while Becca and the kids had learned to live with it, she knew they missed Ben as much as she did.
Sarah maneuvered through the crowds efficiently, her path veering toward an unassuming building that only stood six stories tall, relatively squat to the surrounding high-rises and skyscrapers. But it was more than enough space to serve the purposes of the GSF. It was a newer facility, their original location in Chicago destroyed during the Global Power fiasco two years ago, the same incident that had triggered the death of her brother and, from what they could tell so far, when Taylor Grimes took his first steps on his current path of destruction.
New York City itself wasn’t bad, and even after a lifetime in Chicago Sarah was starting to like it here. There was always something to do, something to see. She had only three complaints for their new digs. The first were the sports teams (go Cubbies!). The second was the pizza; she couldn’t find a decent deep dish anywhere in the city. And the third was the fact that she was no longer in her hometown, where Becca and the kids still lived. They were the one link to normalcy that she possessed, and she loved them more than anything in the world. Even her job.
When Sarah stepped inside the GSF building, Hank sat behind his desk, his feet propped up, leaning back, reading some fitness magazine, not that the man needed it. At nearly six foot six and two hundred and fifty pounds, Hank was built like a linebacker. When he saw Sarah enter, he lowered the magazine and flashed a grin that was missing a tooth on the left side of his mouth. “Hey, Sarah.”
“Hey, Hank.” Sarah reached into her pocket and tossed him a Snickers bar that he snatched out of the air, engulfing it with his massive fist. “You know those things will go right to your hips.”
Hank smiled and unwrapped the top half of the candy bar, his bulging muscles looking like they would rip the shirt in half. “It’s my cheat day.”
Sarah shook her head and stepped inside the elevator. She held the door and poked her head back out as Hank engulfed half the bar in one bite. “How’d our boys do?”
“Lost in the ninth. Three-run homer off the closer.” The words came out mumbled and half audible.
Sarah thumped her head against the side of the elevator doors. “Sometimes I think they do it just to hurt me.” The elevator doors shut, and Hank waved as he finished the second half o
f the candy bar in another massive bite.
White halogen lights above flashed blood red, and a green beam scanned her body as the elevator moved. Once the scan was complete, the lights returned to normal, the elevator came to a slow, inertia-buckling stop, and a robotic voice chimed her arrival. “Welcome back, Agent Hill.”
Sarah examined the chaos of all the support agents with their monitors filled with all of the violence erupting in every corner of the globe. “Yeah. Welcome back.” She found Bryce at his small island of monitors and thumped him on the back of the head.
“Ow!” Bryce turned, rubbing his head.
Sarah turned and thrust out the side of her jacket, where a bullet from the Chinese operatives was still lodged in it. “See this? That’s your fault.”
“Just try and duck next time.”
“Did you speak to Mack yet?” It was genuine curiosity. The boss hadn’t spoken to her in almost twenty-four hours, which was surprising, because there was usually something she did that warranted a scolding. She had more citations in her file than anyone else in the history of the GSF—a point of pride from her point of view.
“We have a meeting with him soon.” Bryce glanced at his watch. “Shit. Now, actually.” He closed down his station and grabbed his laptop. Sarah followed him to Mack’s office, giving Grace a high five on her way inside.
“Hey, did you get your money from Johnny yet?” Sarah asked.
“No,” Grace answered, laughing. “He doesn’t think I covered the spread.”
“What?” Sarah spotted Johnny cowering behind the monitors on his desk, hoping that he couldn’t be seen. “You better pay up! I know where you live!” Sarah ducked back into the office, the glass door swinging shut behind her, then thrust a thumb back toward Grace. “You know, the only thing I can find wrong with that girl is the fact that she’s a Yankees fan. And that she’s dating you.”
“Once again your commentary about my love life splits my sides.” Bryce kept his tone dry as he set up his laptop.
Sarah collapsed into a chair then smiled. “Where’s Mack?” His desk was empty, making the absence of their fearless leader fully notable both by his physical presence (he was a man of girth, the fact of which Sarah never forgot to remind him) and the grumbling complaints he would rattle out between breaths (ninety percent because of something she had done).
“He’s at Langley,” Bryce answered, throwing up a projection on the wall from his laptop.
“Are they hiring?” Sarah asked. “I bet they have better benefits than this place.”
“Careful what you wish for, Hill.” Mack’s voice rumbled through the room’s speakers, and his face suddenly appeared like the Ghost of Christmas Past on the wall opposite the door. “And even if they were hiring, they wouldn’t take someone with your amount of discipline issues.”
“Then why do you keep me around?” Sarah asked.
“It’s something I ask myself every day.” Mack turned to Bryce. “What’d you find in the files we sent you?”
The projection switched to a split screen, half still on Mack’s droopy hound dog face and the other filtering more of Bryce’s Matrix-like coding. “It turns out that Grimes had spent a lot of time downloading portions of the Global Power coding from the CIA servers. He was extracting them in small chunks to remain undetected, but he eventually downloaded the whole thing.”
“You think that’s how Grimes is manipulating the nuclear weapons?” Mack asked.
“It’s part of the reason,” Bryce answered. “But he’d still need one hell of piece of hardware to power software this potent. In some of his personal notes he kept referencing something called ‘Black Box.’ I think that might be what he’s using.”
“I’ll see what the directors here know about that,” Mack answered. “What is our plan in the mean time?”
“I can try and isolate the coding that Grimes used to create his current software, but it’s going to take time. Once I’m able to locate the source code he used, I can track his location.” Bryce held up a finger. “But with the trillions of lines of code, it’s going to take the satellite a while to find any suitable combination matches.”
“While Bryce is working on the code, we’ll need to continue our stabilizing efforts,” Mack said. “I’ll be coordinating with the CIA and their assets in their specific international theaters to try and take a diplomatic approach on this.” Mack paused, drawing in a breath. “I don’t need to remind you two that what we’re up against is nuclear holocaust. If Grimes or the leader of a nuclear state gets trigger happy, it could start World War Three.”
“What does Grimes want?” Sarah asked.
“He’s blackmailing intelligence agencies for classified documents,” Mack answered. “If the directors don’t turn over their assets, then he threatens to blow them all to hell.”
“Then he uses those documents to stir up trouble with those country’s enemies and allies,” Bryce said.
The door to the office swung open, and Grace stepped inside. “Guys, you’ve got a call.”
“What a douche.” Sarah looked to Grace. “Oh, not you, Grace.”
“Quiet, Hill!” Mack said. “Who is it?”
The color had drained from Grace’s cheeks, and she clutched the door frame for support. “Taylor Grimes.”
Chapter 4
The glass walls of Mack’s office fogged to conceal their meeting from the rest of the floor. When Grace put the call through and Taylor Grimes finally appeared on the screen, he looked exactly how Sarah remembered him: the CIA poster boy with his clean-cut hair, square jaw, and a fetish for proper procedure and protocol.
“Hello, Agent Hill,” Grimes said. Neither his expression nor his tone revealed any hint of a smile.
“If you’re looking to collect the Blu-Ray collector’s addition of Titanic you gave me for Christmas last year, I burned it the second I opened it,” Sarah said.
“Still cracking jokes I see.”
“Still shoving that stick up your ass I see,” Sarah replied mockingly.
“You and your agency have had a good run,” Grimes said, not acknowledging the joke through expressions of amusement or pain. “But that run is over.”
“I think we’ve still got a few good ones left in us,” Sarah said. “More than enough to take care of you, Grimey.”
“From what I’ve read in your files, I can see why your agency allows you so much free rein despite your…” He frowned, squeezing his eyebrows together and tapping his forefinger to his lips. “How did Mack phrase it again? Strong will?”
“Ha! I’ve heard worse than that from Mack.”
“Yeah, like egomaniac,” Bryce said.
“Or neurotic-compulsive,” Grace said.
“Or a pain in my ass,” Mack added, last but not least.
Sarah held up both hands. “That’s enough audience participation.” She turned back to Grimes, wanting nothing more than to reach through cyberspace and wrap her hands around that neck underneath that block head of his. “You’ve gone to a lot of trouble to get my attention.” She stepped closer to the screen, tilting her head to the side. “I’m not sure you’ll end up liking that.”
Grimes leaned a little closer to the camera, his face growing larger on the screen. “The currency in the new world order is information and data, and I intend for my country to have the most. The GSF was created in answer to the world’s problems. And now Black Box is my answer to your agency’s reckless existence. By threatening nuclear states with their own weapons I have already assimilated classified documents from every major intelligence organization across the globe. Some of which I have leaked to their enemies. So while the rest of the world is tearing itself apart, the United States retains the title of the world’s premier military might.” The hint of a reserved smile twitched up the side of his face. “I’m going to show you what it’s like when the puppet master becomes the puppet.”
Sarah’s knuckle popped from the tight grip on her arm, and when she glanced down, sh
e saw her nail had broken the skin, drawing blood. “What do you want?”
Again that eerie smile appeared, giving Grimes an unnatural look. “You have operated under the guise of excellence your entire career, and I want to see what wins out. Your skills, or my intelligence.” The screen split between Grimes’s face and a map of the Middle East. “In what is arguably the most unstable region in the world, one wrong move by parties on either side of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict could ignite a war that would consume the entire region and possibly the rest of the world.” The map zoomed in on the capital of Iran, highlighting Tehran. “The supreme leader of Iran will be giving an address to his people at the Imamzadeh Saleh mosque. The event will be outside, and I’m told thousands are set to attend.” The screen flashed back to the glowing green dots across the Jewish state. “I’ve already reached out to Israel’s Mossad. Unless they kill the Ayatollah, I will detonate their nuclear devices, essentially obliterating the entirety of their nation. That is, unless you can stop them, Agent Hill. You’re their one chance at salvation.”
Grimes disappeared along with his map, and Mack was reinstated to taking up the wall by himself, immediately looking to Bryce. “Could you track him?” Bryce shook his head, shaking the laptop in frustration. Mack let out a throaty sigh, turning his droopy eyes toward Sarah. “Then you better catch a plane to Tehran, Hill.”
***
The Middle East had two inexhaustible resources: heat and sand. And it didn’t matter how many times Sarah traveled to the area; she still couldn’t get used to it. “It’s like being stuck inside a sandbox, except the toys have been replaced with people who want to kill you.” Through the narrow eye slit of her burka, she examined the faces she passed on the bustling streets of Tehran.
“That’s because most of them do want to kill you,” Bryce said. “It’s just not for the usual reasons like your personality or the fact that you never listen.”
