140914383X

by Raymond Khoury

  My mom didn’t talk about it much. Growing up, the subject of his suicide was off limits. Not that I asked much. At the time, all she’d told me was that, after his death, she’d discovered that he’d been depressed and was on medication. It was the most I’d ever got out of her on the subject. I don’t think she ever really dealt with the grief or the sadness that he’d never told her about it. She just bottled it up, same as he had, I guess. Then, when I moved out and went to study law at Notre Dame, she remarried, moved to Cape Cod, and threw herself into her new life. We never talked about my dad after that. It was like her first husband had never existed.

  I learned later that it’s perfectly normal for a ten-year-old boy to repress the memory of his father’s blood splattered against a wall—indeed, the first time in decades I had recalled the memory so vividly was when reading the redacted file from my reluctant CIA source about the man who had brainwashed my son. Mothers, however, are generally expected to ensure that the memory doesn’t become buried too deep. On balance, maybe we both came out of it OK.

  Thinking about my absent father also reminded me of how I wanted to always be there for Alex. My line of work, however, wasn’t the most risk-free of occupations. It was something I needed to figure out.

  One thing I didn’t need to figure out, one thing I knew with absolute certainty, was that I would never forgive the man who subjected a four-year-old boy to treatment that was still beyond belief, even though I’d seen the results with my own eyes. Whatever it took, I was going to find him. Nothing would ever change when it came to Reed Corrigan and me.

  I hadn’t shared any of this with Nick. I knew he could sense it. Ten years of sharing the line of fire with someone usually does that. If it didn’t, you were probably in the wrong business. But he knew better than to ask. He knew that if I wasn’t sharing something, I was probably doing it for his own good. To give him deniability, to let him keep his job and not face prosecution. Because to get to the bottom of the shark-infested sinkhole that had first sucked me in a few months ago, I’d probably need to break a law or two. Nick got that—but he wasn’t happy about it. Which was why we’d spent a lot of hours in strained silence outside Daland’s house while we avoided the whales/aliens/elephants in the room—well, the cabin of our Ford Expedition, anyway.

  The big problem was, Corrigan was proving impossible to track down. The CIA was clearly protecting his identity, for reasons they weren’t about to share with me. He was obviously a valuable asset, and I’d run out of options in terms of flushing him out.

  Project Azorian also turned out to be a blind alley, both regarding Corrigan and my dad. Also named “Project Jennifer,” it was the CIA’s code name for an eight hundred million dollar operation to raise a sunken Russian submarine from the Pacific Ocean floor back in 1974. Howard Hughes had lent his name to the project to help with the cover story that the vessel that would raise the sub, the Hughes Glomar Explorer, was out mining manganese deposits. It had been one of the most expensive and technologically complex operations in CIA history—and one of their biggest successes—but the huge dossier about it was, in terms of what I was after, a dead end. I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what the sub project had to do with my dad, or what it or my dad had to do with the CIA op called Operation Cold Burn.

  The link with my dad, though, could open up some fresh possibilities. I’d asked Kurt to take another peek inside the CIA’s servers to see if they had anything else on my dad. So far, he hadn’t had much luck on that front either.

  All of which left me with two final angles of attack.

  One was for me to bully Kirby, the CIA analyst/Lothario, once again. Get him to fish for files about my dad, this time, see if following that trail instead would lead me to Corrigan.

  The other was to talk to my mother and see if she knew more about my dad’s death than she’d let on.

  I really wasn’t looking forward to either of them.

  4

  Newark, New Jersey

  I walked across to the north side of Riverbank Park and waited, glad to be out in the open air and, for that matter, anywhere other than the inside of a Ford Expedition. Out here, most of the snow had already melted, though more was apparently due later tonight.

  On the other side of the Passaic stood the Red Bull Arena, home of New York’s MLS team and subject of one of the most protracted development tales in recent New Jersey history. I had promised to take Alex to watch the Red Bulls at some point after we’d enjoyed watching the US soccer team at last summer’s World Cup in Brazil, though I had a nagging concern that once bitten, he’d want to attend every single game. On the other hand, sports seemed to be turning into a genuine passion for him, and anything that promoted a healthy, distracting routine in him was positive.

  I’d crossed paths with Kurt Jaegers for the first time a few years ago when he moved up to the seventh spot on the FBI’s cybercrime watch list after hacking into the UN’s server farm, using the same skill set I needed to track down Corrigan. He agreed to help me and hacked into the CIA’s databanks after I promised him a get-out-of-jail-free card should he ever get arrested for something reasonably defensible. Kurt soon embraced the project with gusto, which surprised me. I was supposed to be one of the bad guys, as far as he was concerned—you know, big brother and all that. But Kurt and I connected. He had a good heart. I liked him, and I enjoyed hearing about the fantasy idealist world he inhabited.

  For our meetings, Kurt always insisted on different locations and times to ensure that I hadn’t been followed, even though I was pretty sure I was perfectly capable of doing this myself. His levels of paranoia weren’t too outrageous, though, considering the people we were up against, although time was tight, me being due to meet Nick at Federal Plaza at four for the Daland post-arrest briefing.

  I took a few steps toward the river and casually scanned through three-sixty. I was clean.

  Kurt told me that he’d read a stack of books on fieldcraft and practiced covert techniques within MMORPGs—the “massive” in Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game, he’d assured me jokingly, not a reference to his waist size. People overuse words a lot nowadays—everything is amazing, everyone’s a genius—although in his case, massive was an understatement. But as he emerged from the tree line to the south, it was still bizarre to see the new, thinner Kurt. He’d lost a ton of weight—OK, maybe not an actual ton. I thought I could take some credit for him dropping so much flab. Our regular meetings not only got him out of the house, but also appeared to have given him a sense of purpose where previously, he had none.

  Over the months he’d been helping me out, I’d got to know Kurt well. He’d opened up to me—probably more than he’d done with most people, I thought, given what he’d told me about his life. He hadn’t had it easy, not that I’d imagined otherwise.

  Throughout his school years, Kurt had been the butt of exceptionally cruel jokes—both verbal and practical—by a clique of particularly vicious girls. This systematic campaign had stemmed from his temerity in asking one of them to a dance at their fifth grade end-of-year party, a crime seemingly so heinous that he deserved to be punished for it till the end of his schooling.

  By middle school, this clique had shared their hatred of Kurt with their meathead boyfriends and his final two years of education had been off-the-charts intolerable. If it hadn’t been for his Sony PlayStation, his dial-up modem and the trailblazing Internet chat rooms he’d joined as soon as they launched, he would have put an end to his miserable existence long before he’d had a chance to think through the long-term consequences of such a decision.

  As with many other social outcasts, the Internet and the rapidly growing gamer culture it fed off ended up giving Kurt a reason to live. And like most hardcore gamers, he was a neophile at heart and wanted to see what would come next. He instinctively knew that games would become better, faster and more immersive and he wanted to be around as they did so. By the time he was twenty, he was as addicted to console
games and the online world as he was to food, his treatment at the hands of the witches of East Brunswick having served to confirm his withdrawal from the world of women made of flesh and his dedication to those made of pixels.

  If I didn’t need Kurt myself, I’d probably have recommended him to our Cyber Division by now, but he and I had developed a routine and neither of us seemed to want to mess with it. Over the last few months, we’d worked together enough for me to mostly can my sarcastic instincts and accumulate no little respect for Kurt’s doggedness. I also knew enough about the way things were going with surveillance and data-trawling capabilities, drones, high-powered mikes and micro-cameras to understand that one day, real-world agents would be almost entirely redundant. I just hoped that day didn’t come until I had taken my pension.

  Kurt was grinning from ear to ear as he ambled toward me, his gait still that of someone carrying the hundred extra pounds he’d recently shed. Maybe it was because of the holiday season. Christmas turned guys like Kurt back into Fifth Graders—happy ones at that. If it wasn’t for keeping our meetings on the down-low, I fully suspect he would have been wearing a green knitted sweater that featured a reindeer.

  Glancing from side to side, he covered the final few yards to where I was standing and gave me a small bow.

  “Kon'nichiwa, watashi no kunshu.”

  This was another of his tradecraft obsessions: routing our phone calls through Japan-based Skype accounts that he’d hijacked and never referring to himself or to me by our real names on any calls or texts. Which made no sense at all, given that we weren’t even remotely Japanese. “Kurt, seriously. We’re actually here, together.”

  “No names, dude,” he said, flinching. “Come on. What if someone’s tailing you and listening in on us?”

  “I think I’ve got that covered,” I said, then added, pointedly, “Kurt.” With a juvenile half-grin.

  He just brought it out in me.

  He groaned, then gestured around him. “What do you think? Cool spot for a meet, no?”

  “Pure genius.” See what I mean? We all do it.

  On the other hand, I did resist saying “Kurt” one more time.

  Instead, I said, “You sure you haven’t spent time at Quantico?” No way could I kill the sarcasm entirely. Especially when Kurt had me on a continuing tour of the myriad attractions of Essex County.

  “Quantico, shwantico,” he scoffed. “I’d like to see how long you and your guys would survive in the siege of Orgrimmar.”

  I ducked asking what that was—the cultural reference gap between us was beyond unbridgeable—and studied his face, then I scanned him up and down more carefully. Something else had changed, something other than the dropped weight: a general overhaul on the grooming front. Then it hit me. The Amazing Shrinking Kurt was chasing a female. As impossible as that sounded, I was somehow sure he was definitely on the prowl, and his upbeat manner made it clear he thought he was getting somewhere.

  Not ideal, from a purely selfish point of view. Last thing I needed was for Kurt’s mind to be diverted from the hunt.

  I spread my hands quizzically. “Who is she?”

  Eyes wide, Kurt pulled back his head for a second. “What? No!”

  “Come on.”

  “How’d you—?” Then his grin returned and he wagged a puffy finger at me. “Oh, you’re good. You’re like so totally in the zone.”

  I tilted my head, my expression egging him for an answer. “Spill.”

  “You’re gonna love her. She’s great. And she’s solid, a real asset for the team. She’s going in deeper than I ever could.”

  I felt a stab of bile in the back of my throat. “‘Going in?’ What are you talking about? You told her? About us?”

  Kurt backed away a couple of steps. “Relax, dude. Hear me out. She doesn’t know who you are, doesn’t know why we’re looking for Corrigan. But she’s got skills, man. Real skills.”

  I took a deep breath and calmed myself down. Kurt was no fool. He also wasn’t having much success in penetrating the CIA’s servers beyond what we already knew. Maybe he did need help. I was well aware that hacking government agencies had become considerably more difficult since the exploits of Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden. But this was a dangerous game to invite someone to play.

  I gestured to an empty bench. We both sat, Kurt edging away till there was a couple of feet between us.

  “OK, so . . . who is she?”

  Nervously, he crossed and uncrossed his legs. “She’s called Gigi. Gigi Decker. Here . . .”

  He took out his smartphone, swiped his finger across its screen to unlock it, and handed it to me. Its screen showed a full-figured and surprisingly attractive redhead who was—presumably, knowing Kurt’s interests as I did—dressed in the garb of some kind of World of Warcraft character.

  Gigi was clearly screensaver-serious.

  He reclaimed the phone. “Lady Jaina Proudmoore. Archmage of Kirin Tor. That’s her real hair, by the way.” He added this last part with genuine pride.

  “I can see what you mean by solid. She seems totally . . . reliable.” I can’t really raise one eyebrow, but if I could, it would have been up.

  Kurt looked offended. “Hey, when she’s not in Pandaria, she’s one hell of a hacker. I mean, truly outstanding. She’s hacked the CIA’s D-bases deeper than anyone I know. And the cool part is she’s ideologically neutral. She hacks because she can.”

  “And to impress you, of course.”

  He beamed. “What can I tell you? I’m a catch.”

  I rolled my eyes, but my mouth smiled. He really was a lovable son of a bitch. I hoped Gigi wasn’t about to break his heart, and not just because that would screw us both.

  “OK, so she’s amazing.” Clearly, I need to retract my grumpy earlier criticism about contemporary word use. “So what did she find?”

  He grimaced. “Well, it’s good and it’s bad.”

  My entire body tensed in anticipation. Maybe our search was finally going to move out of park. “What do you mean?”

  He closed the space between us. “She went in and snooped around the user records and protocol logs related to the terms I’d been using in my searches around both Corrigan and your dad and came up with nothing. Then she went in again and went deeper. Still nothing. Then a couple of days later, we tried again, only this time, the logs and the user records themselves were gone. Everything that had data links to our target folders. Gone. I mean, up until now, they’ve been changing the access codes as per standard operation procedure at Langley. But in the last week, they’ve modified the protocols and wiped dozens of files.”

  He gave me that knowing look, the one loaded with portent.

  I already knew the answer, but I asked anyway, “So they know we’ve been looking?”

  He nodded, his eyes even wider with conspiracy.

  “I’m having a hard time seeing anything ‘good’ here, Kurt.”

  “Well, yeah, agreed, that part’s not great. But there’s more. Gigi, she doesn’t give up easy. And this was like a challenge for her, like they’d thrown down the gauntlet. So she goes into overdrive and starts trying all kinds of things, including this little trick of hers. She tries misspelling Corrigan in her trawl. She thinks laterally like that, you know?” He paused and nodded, more just to himself, grinning with admiration, savoring the thought. “And she got a hit. One with an ‘m’ at the end, as in, Corrigam.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “I’m telling you. She says it was more common than you’d think before spellchecking technology closed that crack.”

  He went quiet again. Kurt had this irritating habit of pausing to build portent. Maybe he’d watched too many badly written TV shows and it had affected the cadence at which he spoke.

  “And . . . ?”

  “She found a reference to Reed Corrigam—with an ‘m’—in a deep archive. It was in a report from the Direccíon de Inteligencia—the DI, Cuba’s intelligence agency.”

  I knew wh
at the DI was, but I didn’t want to burst his bubble. We at the Bureau had been known to butt heads with their operatives in Miami. Instead, I just said, “Makes sense. They would have been operational in El Salvador back then.”

  Kurt nodded, then looked around suspiciously, gave our surroundings a second pan-and-scan, then pulled some folded papers out from his pocket and handed them to me. “It’s all in here. It talks about a meeting a DI guy had with Corrigan. It says there was a leak from the DI, and the DI agent is only referred to by his initials, but it mentions the name ‘Octavio Camacho’ as well and I googled that. The hit that seemed most promising was this guy,” he said as he flicked through the printouts before pulling out a particular page. “He was a Portuguese journalist.”

  “‘Was?’”

  “Yep. Camacho died in 1981.”

  I flicked back to the report about the meeting. It had also taken place that year—a couple of months before Camacho’s death.

  I could feel my shoulders drop. “That’s it?”

  Kurt’s face followed suit. “So far. But she’s still at it. She’s trying to hack some digitized archive backups. The encryption-compression algorithms aren’t as secure as those for live data. At least not for Gigi when she’s in the zone.” He brightened at her name. The guy was totally lovestruck. “But maybe you’ll come up with more on the Camacho front. Maybe you could check with Portuguese Intelligence, see if they’ve got something on Corrigan.”

  “Or Corrigam.”

  He smiled. “Exactly.”

  I wasn’t thrilled. It wasn’t much—not much at all. Just another dark alley with an insurmountable brick wall at its end.

  Kurt read my face. “Dude, we’ll find something. She will, anyway. I know it.”

  I shrugged. “All right. Do me a favor. Check on something else for me.”

  “Shoot.”

  “You remember our little Casanova down in DC?”