Rogue Operator

by J. Robert Kennedy

  Finally a door opened and a man in a cheap but neat suit stepped out.

  “You wanted to see me?”

  “Detective Percy?” asked Kane as he rose.

  The man nodded.

  “Dylan Kane, Shaw’s of London.”

  Kane extended his hand, firmly shaking the Detective’s, immediately sizing him up. The returned shake was firm, dry and no longer than it needed to be. This man was confident, and felt in control. Bags under his eyes though suggested he was having trouble sleeping, and the slight shake in his hand when he accepted the business card Kane offered, suggested caffeine was being used to compensate for the lack of sleep.

  Something’s troubling him.

  He dismissed domestic problems. There was a ring on the finger, which in this type of community, and his age, most likely meant his wife took care of him. And his shirt and pants were freshly pressed, his tie matched, and his shoes were clean. No, this man’s wife still loved him and cared for him. Even last night. And the luggage under his eyes suggested long term problems.

  Job.

  He couldn’t imagine there being a lot of pressure here, not with at least his brief exposure, so that meant a particular case. And if he were a betting man, which he always was when in Macau, he’d bet it was the case he was about to question him on.

  “How can I help you, Mr. Kane?”

  “I need to ask you a few questions about the disappearance of Margaret Peterson and her two children.”

  The cloud that swept over Detective Percy’s visage confirmed Kane’s suspicions. It’s this case.

  “Who did you say you were again?” asked the detective, rereading the card.

  “Dylan Kane, Shaw’s of London.”

  “And what does Shaw’s have to do with my missing persons case?”

  “There’s a substantial life insurance policy involved, and when it’s of this size, we naturally investigate, especially when the circumstances are so, shall we say, unusual?”

  Percy frowned, then led him through a secure door and into an interrogation room.

  “Give me a minute.”

  The detective disappeared as Kane sat down, making a show of opening his briefcase and removing a pad of paper and a pen, along with a stack of files that had nothing to do with the case on hand, as there had been no time to properly prep the cover. This wouldn’t be the first time he had pulled this bluff, and every time someone had asked to see the files, he had been able to successfully plead client confidentiality. Except that one time in Vietnam. A gun had been pointed at his head, the files were shown, looked at, and returned. Fortunately for him his interrogator couldn’t read a word of English, and the empty “Insert client photo if available” square was easily explained. “Most of our clients don’t like their photo taken.”

  The door opened and Percy walked in with a stack of his own files. A stack far larger than what Kane had expected.

  He’s actually going to cooperate?

  CIA Headquarters, Langley, Virginia

  Chris Leroux was in love. He was pretty certain of it. All he knew was he had never felt this way before. Especially after just one coffee. But he couldn’t stop thinking about her. It had actually felt comfortable. Natural. Meant to be.

  He was definitely in love.

  He glanced over at Sherrie’s desk and she was looking at him. He smiled, and so did she. A message popped on his screen.

  “Dinner?”

  It was from her.

  He looked back at her and smiled, nodding. The smile she beamed back made his heart stop, and he was a wasted puddle of hormones for the rest of the afternoon, the conversation merely replaying itself over and over in his head, the way she laughed, smiled. Touched him.

  Only on the hand or the arm, nothing too forward, but he knew from his own research—reading—that when a woman touched you like that, it meant she liked you. They even drank their coffees at the same time and pace. It was uncanny. If he didn’t know better, he’d think he was being played, but not her. Not Sherrie. She was perfect, and besides, he would know if she were being dishonest. After all, he was CIA. Though not specifically trained to detect whether or not he was being manipulated, he had read enough reports to know what to look for.

  Conversations being too smooth.

  Mirroring of actions such as lifting and raising of cups or bottles, eating at same pace.

  Unnecessary gentle touching on the hands, arms, shoulders, legs.

  Laughing at jokes that weren’t necessarily funny.

  Leroux frowned. He thought his jokes were funny, but were they actually? And now that he thought of it, he was trying to remember if he had actually told her any jokes, or if she were simply laughing at simple stories.

  He played back the conversation in his head, then froze.

  “How did you get involved in the CIA?”

  He tried to recall his response, but couldn’t, it was a blur of lust and love.

  “Have you met any agents?”

  His heart slammed into his chest.

  Did I mention Kane?

  He felt his head swim, and he glanced over at her. She wasn’t looking at him, but he could swear her head had darted away just as he turned his.

  And if I did mention Kane, what did I say about him?

  Ogden Police Department

  2186 Lincoln Ave, Ogden, Utah

  “That’s quite the case file.” Kane looked at the stack, at least several inches high. “What’s happened here?”

  The tired detective looked at him, then took the first thick file off the pile, holding it up, and giving it a shake.

  “This is the kidnapping of Margaret Peterson and her two children, Ayla and Darius, to which there are plenty of witnesses, but as of yet, almost a week later, there have been no ransom demands, nothing.” He placed the file on the desk, and picked up the next one. “This is the presumed kidnapping of Phoebe Shephard and her son, Charles, the same day, and again, no ransom demands, nothing.”

  Kane didn’t say anything. The more the locals talked of their own volition, the more likely he was to get some tidbit he wasn’t aware of. Once the freely offered information began to dry up, or become repetitive, he would start his subtle interrogation.

  The next file was displayed.

  “This is the file on the disappearance, and presumed drowning, of Jason Peterson, husband to the aforementioned Margaret and father to Ayla and Darius, Carl Shephard, husband to the aforementioned Phoebe and father to Charles, and Phil Hopkins, thankfully husband and father to no one.”

  Kane knew that Jason Peterson was most likely alive, it being difficult to fool a mother with a voice modification machine, and he had heard the voice on the copy Leroux had sent him. The voice had been strong and clear, not disguised, but stressed. He was definitely under duress, but despite somehow being able to make a phone call, he had not only not asked for help, but had specifically requested that none be provided. Kane had his theories, and none of them were good.

  “They never found the bodies, which is why I presume you’re here.”

  Kane nodded, rather than interrupt the flow.

  Another file.

  “This is the file covering a break-in at Omega Bionetix, discovered the next day, that stripped their lab clean. Everything was gone, even their damned water cooler!”

  A smoking-bolt operation!

  His heart rate upped a few ticks as he thought about it. A smoking-bolt operation, where a team would go into a location and strip out everything, leaving nothing but the “smoking bolts”, was rare nowadays. It was still done, even he had done it, but usually you were after a specific piece of tech, not an entire lab. This was something not in the files sent by Leroux. He made a quick note on his pad, this new piece of information blowing several of his previous theories out of the water.

  The detective held up the second to last file, his face clouding further, his eyes wells of tears, but the clenched fist his free hand made suggested a heart filled with rage.

&
nbsp; “And this is the murder of my partner, twenty-nine year old Jamie Conway, who never had the chance to be a wife to anyone, let alone a mother, and died in a shootout with at least four perps of unknown identity.”

  More information he didn’t know about. And that was surprising. Leroux was usually very thorough, so how he would miss that a cop working the case was killed was beyond him.

  The final file was raised.

  “And this, this is the most unbelievable of them all.” He shook it hard as he spoke, then slammed it onto the top of the new pile. “That”—he jabbed his finger at the file—“is the report detailing what we know—which is nothing by the way!—on how the bodies of the four men I shot, the four men who shot my partner to death, disappeared from our morgue, along with all physical and electronic records. It might as well be as if they never existed.”

  A cleanup operation.

  The more he listened, the more this sounded like an intelligence operation. Industrial espionage, unless state sponsored—which was still a possibility—didn’t have cleaners.

  “How long after the bodies reached the morgue were they taken?”

  “Camera footage shows hospital staff moving the bodies and loading them into a private transport. They claimed they had transfer orders for the bodies to have them sent to Salt Lake City. It was nothing really out of the ordinary, so nobody questioned it. Of course, the bodies never arrived, and all information collected was cleaned out at some point before the next morning. Their techs are saying their computers were hacked, some sort of ‘hunter-killer virus’ I think they called it, that searched specifically for their records only, and destroyed them and nothing else.”

  “Backups?”

  “Destroyed before the nightly backup took place.”

  “And the paper records?”

  “Four files, removed from the records room by somebody whose face we couldn’t get a clear shot of, the cameras always going fuzzy when he walked near one.”

  Signal interference generator.

  Another hi-tech toy that Langley and other foreign equivalents provided as needed. Whoever did this were pros. Which might explain why he was being followed. But again, who would know he was here, and how? And who would know, let alone even think, to watch Leroux?

  Then it hit him.

  We would.

  The agency watches its own. It was standard procedure. And since they knew Leroux had an interest in this case, they would watch him closely, probably intercepted his communications, and obviously his travel arrangements. And if Leroux didn’t know about the dead cop and the lab break in, then the information was being carefully shielded from him, because Kane knew damned well that Leroux could dig out anything from anywhere.

  Which meant the information was being scrubbed before it could get into any system Leroux could access. Christ, that means scrubbing newspaper sites and everything! Somebody didn’t want this being messed with, and they were within his own agency.

  The thought sent a chill down his spine.

  Is this rogue, or sanctioned?

  Super 8 Motel Parking Lot, Ogden, Utah

  Detective Percy sat in his new unmarked car, the last one a complete write-off after Jamie’s murder. His interview with the insurance investigator had been an opportunity to vent, and he had probably said too much. In fact, he knew he had said too much, and by the end of it, he had realized he was being pumped for information, and cut off the questions.

  Something didn’t smell right.

  It wasn’t anything this Kane guy did or said. He asked all the right questions for the job, he expressed the proper level of concern about Jamie’s death, and asked the kind of unrelated questions he would expect of a curious person.

  But something was wrong. He couldn’t put his finger on it. It was a gut feeling that probably had to do with everything being wrong on this case. Helicopters, military transports, shootouts on darkened roads, bodies disappearing, false paperwork, computer viruses, labs being cleaned out.

  Everything.

  Which in his gut told him not to trust this insurance investigator. Unfortunately his brain didn’t receive his gut’s message until he had spewed a fountain of information to the guy in his effort to tell anyone that would listen, his story. Everyone at the damned station was tiptoeing around him, nobody wanting to mention Jamie’s name. He was looking forward to the funeral tomorrow to hopefully put all that behind him.

  And hopefully get the damned desk duty his lieutenant had assigned him to, over with.

  So this was a coffee break. He had asked Kane where he was staying, and the man had volunteered the information. A quick call confirmed it, so rather than follow Kane, he merely waited fifteen minutes, and drove to the hotel. In fact, he was parked at the Texaco, the Super 8 tucked in behind the gas station, figuring it would be less obvious. He had done a drive-by, and there were a smattering of vehicles, including a large Ford Expedition rental he presumed was Kane’s, it being the only rental in the lot, and the only vehicle that really looked out of place, the rest of the vehicles older with far more body damage than he’d expect an insurance investigator from Shaw’s to tolerate.

  And it was parked directly in front of the room the desk clerk had said one Dylan Kane was occupying.

  Sometimes it was just nice to match the phone evidence with some eyeballed evidence. He sat in the car, waiting for what, he had no clue, and soon found himself regretting not going into the convenience store attached to the Texaco upon arrival. Normally he’d leave Jamie in the car, then load up, but this was a one man, against orders surveillance, and he was stuck.

  There was a commotion behind him and he looked in the rearview mirror to see a man in a suit screaming at the piece of eye candy sitting in the driver’s seat of a Jaguar convertible, its top down, steam and smoke spewing from under the hood.

  “Turn the fuckin’ wheel!”

  “I am, Ricky! It’s hard! If I break anotha fuckin’ nail, I’m chargin’ ya double!”

  “Fuck your nails, just turn the fuckin’ wheel!”

  Percy turned his attention back to the motel, the overpriced bucket on wheels, its regretful owner and his afternoon delight rolling by toward the motel. And yawned.

  How long was he supposed to wait?

  And for what?

  This is stupid.

  A black SUV rolled by, pulling into the motel parking lot, next to Kane’s vehicle. Another guest? It was a reserved spot for the next room. The thought was banished when four men in suits climbed out, all examining their surroundings, then heading for Kane’s door.

  Shit!

  Super 8 Motel, Ogden, Utah

  Kane didn’t have to wait for the sound of the lock being picked to jump from the bed; he had already done so when he heard the engine of an SUV pull up outside his window. He had slipped the desk clerk an extra twenty to keep the adjacent room empty, and the other room that backed against his headboard, had occupants from North Dakota, at least according to the plates attached to their old Ford Escort.

  A vehicle whose engine sounded nothing like the SUV that just parked in their spot.

  The moment it had pulled up, he was out of bed, slipping his dress shirt on, pulling his slacks up, and slipping his feet into his shoes. It took less than thirty seconds. During which time he heard four doors open, and four doors close.

  Definitely not my neighbors.

  Gun in hand, he looked through the peephole and saw four suits on the other side, all with subtle bulges from their shoulder holsters. He had only seconds before they’d be inside. He could take four average guys in a bar fight no problem, but four highly trained men, possibly agency? For that he would need the element of surprise, and besides, he still didn’t know if these were sanctioned agents, or rogue. He could put a row of bullets through the door right now, ending this, but he would never do that without knowing their intentions.

  Instead, he implemented his escape plan, already prepped in the first five minutes after his arrival this morni
ng. He stepped quietly back from the door, then opened the door to the vacant adjoining room—his twenty dollar payoff now seeming to be money well spent—then opened the second door, it already having been picked. Closing the doors behind him, he was safely out of the room and into the next before the door was picked by his intruders.

  He took up position at the door of the adjacent room and watched the four men enter, their weapons making appearances as they were about to cross the threshold into his room.

  He opened the door and stepped out into the sunlight. Tires squealed nearby and he took a quick look. Unmarked cop car most likely. He knew he had only seconds to clean this up before whom he presumed was Detective Percy got himself hip deep into agency business.

  He pressed himself against the wall, poking his head around the doorframe of the still open door to his room, weapon extended.

  “Good afternoon gentlemen, anything I can do for you?”

  All four spun at the sound of his voice, their weapons raised and pointing at him, but with his limited profile, they were at a disadvantage, but only if they didn’t all open fire at once. And first. This was going down one of two ways. If they valued their own lives more than the mission, whether sanctioned or not, private or not, they’d lower their weapons, and talk. If they felt the mission was more important, and the mission meant killing him, they’d open fire. And either they’d be walking out, or he’d be.

  He was hoping for option one, but expecting two.

  He had no intention of dying in Ogden, Utah.

  He wouldn’t even get his star on the Memorial Wall since he wasn’t technically on Agency business.

  And he wanted his star.

  Not that he had a death wish, but simply that he expected to die on the job. It was an exciting, fulfilling life, and if he died while doing it, he could honestly say he felt he had no regrets. He’d prefer to die one of those fat semi-retired looking spies at a cocktail party collecting intel at the end of a long career, but if he had to die young, so be it.