by Cindy Dees
Capitulating abruptly, she walked forward rapidly, all but dragging the Intelligence officers away from the Chaosium Café and the sheaf of papers on the ground. She stuffed the remaining set of pictures into her purse.
“Where to, boys? Do you have a safe house around here somewhere or are we going for a ride?”
The poor guys seemed confounded by her abruptly cavalier attitude. “Uh, our car’s right here.”
They stopped beside a black sedan and put her in the back seat.
She groused, “Sheesh, aren’t you going to handcuff me or anything? I’m a pretty dangerous character, you know. Us desk-jockey analysts are real beasts.”
The driver rolled his eyes at her in the rearview mirror but didn’t rise to the bait. She caught the other guy eyeing her surreptitiously and grinned. “Whatchya staring at, Sergeant? Haven’t you ever been inside an Internet café before and seen how the other half live?”
The guy glared. “I’m a captain, not an enlisted schmuck.”
She leaned back in her seat. “Dunno that I’d be casting aspersions on enlisted personnel, Captain. They’re the backbone of the Army. They outnumber commissioned officer schmucks by something like twenty-five to one.”
The guy scowled at her openly. She definitely had him off balance now. Of course it probably helped that she was in full punker makeup, and he knew she was an officer. The guy was no doubt having a hard time reconciling the two in his mind. The car pulled to a stop in front of the Pentagon and the two men escorted her inside. They took her in the same side of the building the airliner had hit on 9/11 and downstairs to an anonymous-looking office. Several men at desks glanced up at her and did double takes as she walked past. She wasn’t exactly standard Army issue at the moment. The pair who’d arrested her sat her down at a table in the middle of a one-each interrogating room and pointedly locked the door. She looked around. It came complete with the big, two-way mirror, a surveillance camera and a tape recorder.
She sat impatiently through a reading of her rights. She duly waived the right to counsel and leaned back in her chair. “Okay, gentlemen. What’s this all about?”
“You reported a break-in at your house earlier this morning.”
She frowned. And they were arresting her because of it? “That’s correct,” she answered aloud.
“Was anything stolen?”
“No.” She hadn’t been a rebel most of her life for nothing. She knew full well to volunteer absolutely no information whatsoever under questioning. The headmistress at the Athena Academy had often been unable to pin pranks on her because of her gift for silence during interrogation.
“Were you injured?”
“No.”
“You reported that the intruder was attempting to use your computer. Did you have any classified information on your computer?”
Taking classified information home from work was a felony. She answered that one firmly. “No.”
“Was any data stolen?”
“No.”
“Why did you report the break-in?”
She stared at the officer pointedly, making it clear that she didn’t deign to answer patently stupid questions. The guy reddened slightly.
The second officer dived in. “The Bethesda police reported finding a disturbing collection of pictures of Gabe Monihan in your bedroom.”
She stared back at him as he left the statement hanging between them.
“Care to comment on that?” he asked.
“No.”
“Are you obsessed with Gabe Monihan?”
Wouldn’t these guys have a field day if they knew she’d spent a piece of this morning plastered all over the man in question? She answered the query. “No.”
“Are you stalking him?”
“No.”
“Fixated on him?”
“No.”
As much as she wanted to shout at these guys that they were wasting her valuable time, that would give them power over her. If they knew she was in a hurry, they’d slowball this little interview until it was too late for her to do a damn thing to save Gabe.
She waited for the next inane question.
“Then why have you been illegally accessing information via the Internet pertaining to President-elect Monihan’s personal life?”
She blinked. Huh? Now how in the world had they figured that out? She would readily admit that she’d broken into all kinds of private information about Gabe’s life, college transcripts, medical records and the like, but she’d been searching purely for a reason that the Q-group wanted to kill him. Besides, the guy’s life was as squeaky clean as they came. She hadn’t found a speck of dirt on the man, except that he’d flunked French 101 three times in college.
The real question, though, was how did these guys know about it? Had a wiretap been authorized on her home computer? Except the Oracle database had protection protocols built into it that would detect something like that on any system it was using. Just within the last few hours, she’d had Oracle open and running on both her home and work computers and no alarms had gone off. They couldn’t possibly be tapped!
She leaned forward in her chair. “Do you have any evidence to back up your ludicrous accusation that I’m accessing information illegally, or do I need to call my lawyer and document this interview for a harassment and libel lawsuit?”
“Do you deny the charge, then?” one of the men asked.
“I damn well insist on seeing the evidence upon which you’d make such an accusation,” she retorted. It wasn’t exactly an outright denial, but hopefully the indignation of her tone made up for that minor omission.
“We’re not at liberty to divulge our sources, ma’am,” one of the guys replied.
Sources? Now there was an interesting word choice. In the intelligence community that both she and these men came from, that particular word almost invariably meant a human source. More times than not, an informant. Had they gotten a tip that she’d been poking into Gabe’s personal affairs?
If the Secret Service or the FBI had actually traced hack-ins of Gabe’s records to her, they’d have already come to her home with a search warrant, seized her computer, filed charges against her immediately and arrested her outright. She knew enough hackers to whom that very sequence of events had happened for her to be dead certain of how it went down.
But these guys, despite their initial statement of arrest, had yet to charge her with anything and apparently had not been to her home themselves. And that meant her computer probably had not been seized. Which meant these guys had nothing but a tip of some kind to go on. They were on a fishing expedition.
“Why did you aggressively evade a surveillance detail upon you earlier today, Captain Lockworth?” one of the men fired at her.
So. It had been the Army tailing her toward the Oracle office in Alexandria earlier. “I had no way of knowing if it was the Army or the forces of evil following me. It’s my job to lose enemy surveillance if I become aware of it, is it not?”
No answer to that one.
“You expended extensive military resources on a wild-goose chase.”
She was tempted to tell them they should have sent someone competent to do the job, then. But she bit back the comment. No sense being more antagonistic toward these guys than she had to be. Not if she wanted to get out of here any time soon.
She asked casually, “So how did you guys catch up with me if I lost you?” Might as well let them toot their own horns for a moment to appease their bruised egos.
“There’s been a police APB out on your car all morning.”
Wow. She’d rated an APB? “And why did you think it was that urgent to talk to me, again?”
“We believe you may pose a threat to the safety of the President-elect of the United States.”
She’d laugh if that weren’t so absurd. “Me? A low-level intelligence analyst from DIA? What the heck kind of threat do I pose to anyone? I go to work every day, sit in my office, read a lot of paperwork, write reports and g
o home. Where in the world did you get the notion that I’m a threat to Gabe Monihan?”
“Again, I’m not at liberty to divulge our sources.”
An informant pegged her as a threat to Gabe, too? The timing of it all was mighty damned suspicious. It certainly lent credence to the idea that she’d been shaking the right tree by investigating the Q-group. Look at the garbage that was falling out of it. Somebody’d sicced these guys on her to back her off of the investigation.
“May we have a look at the papers you put in your purse as you were coming out of the Internet café?”
She retorted coolly, “May I see a copy of your search warrant?”
The men scowled. After a pregnant silence, the two officers exchanged glances, got up and left the room. Great. How long was she supposed to cool her jets while they came up with Plan B? She glanced at her watch. Time was a’wasting, here. Vividly aware of the camera and the two-way mirror, she forced herself not to fidget. She painted an expression of saintlike patience on her face and sat quietly in her chair, even though her insides were fairly bursting to get out of here.
One of the men stepped back into the room a few minutes later. “Things will go better for you if you tell us what you’re up to, Captain Lockworth,” he said kindly.
“You can lose the good cop-bad cop routine, buddy. And furthermore, I’m not up to anything.”
“Then why are all those pictures of Monihan plastered all over your bedroom?”
“They’re in my bedroom because it was the largest blank wall in my house to put them where I could see them all. I have the pictures in the first place because I’ve been investigating the attack against him in Chicago last October. Under official orders to do so, I might add.”
“Is that so? Care to share any details of this investigation?” the guy asked. Damned if he didn’t sound genuinely surprised.
“Obviously my superiors deemed that you don’t have the security clearances to hear the details of my work, or else you’d already know the details. Given that, I’m certainly not going to tell you what I’m working on.”
The guy stared at her, frustrated.
She sighed. “Look. I don’t know who put you on this assignment. But you’ve been given a bum steer. I’m no more a stalker than you are. Somebody’s got it in for me and is using you and your partner as patsies to harass me. Unless you guys have warrants and hard evidence to back you up, I’m not talking to anyone. And this is turning into a big waste of your time and mine. So, are you going to charge me with something or not?”
The guy shrugged. “That’s above my pay grade to decide.”
“Tell you what. You let me make a phone call and I’ll see if I can bring this Mexican standoff to an end.” She held her breath, praying the guy would take the offer.
“Who are you going to call?” he asked suspiciously.
She thought fast. Who had the clout to call these guys’ bluffs and spring her out of here fast? It had to be somebody who wasn’t in her chain of command. Somebody who wasn’t trying to sabotage her career. The perfect person came to mind. “I’m going to call my grandfather.”
“He some kind of lawyer or something?”
She managed to keep a straight face. “Yeah. Or something.”
The guy left the room. And came back in a minute later with a telephone in his hand. He plugged it into the wall socket and set it on the table in front of her. He pointedly did not leave the room. Whatever.
She dialed the Pentagon operator. “Would you mind ringing up Joseph Lockworth for me? That’s right. The former director of the CIA. You may need to patch the call through the operator at Langley. Tell him his granddaughter, Diana, urgently needs to speak with him.”
While the operator put the call through, her poor interrogator stared, slack jawed.
She put her hand over the receiver and said to him sympathetically, “I’m sorry, man. Like I said. Somebody’s using you to screw with my career. You’ve been caught in the middle of some political maneuver designed to mess with me. I just hope the fallout from this doesn’t take you down with it.”
While dismay blossomed on the guy’s face, a deep, familiar voice came on the line. “Diana! How are you, kiddo?”
“Hiya, Gramps. Actually I’ve been better. Something weird is going on. Army CID has picked me up and is detaining me. They’re making wild accusations about me stalking Gabe Monihan. Is there any chance you could look into this and get me out of here? They’ve got me locked up in the basement of the Pentagon.”
Her grandfather asked drolly, “Are you stalking Monihan?”
She burst out laughing. “Not hardly.”
“Glad to hear it, pumpkin. Put me on the line with whoever’s breathing over your shoulder. I assume they’ve got someone listening in to whatever you say?”
“Of course. Here he is.” She thrust the telephone receiver into the surprised hand of her interrogator. She watched in high amusement as the guy introduced himself as Captain Hammersmith and stammered out a series of names and Criminal Investigation Detachments. When he’d worked his way up the chain of command to four-star generals, he finally stopped speaking. A short pause and then a crisp, “Yes, sir.”
The guy hung up the phone. “Your grandfather asked me to tell you he’s sending a car and driver around front to pick you up. He said that by the time his driver can get here, he’ll have you ‘sprung from the pokey.’”
She sighed in immense relief.
“Uh, if you’ll excuse me, I need to make a couple calls to my superiors.”
“To warn them about the shit that’s about to roll downhill and land on their unsuspecting heads?” she asked helpfully.
“Yeah. Something like that.”
She grinned openly as the guy hastily exited the room.
True to his word, her grandfather had her out of there in under fifteen minutes. In fact, it was an impressive display of string pulling. But she wasn’t going to stick around long enough to rub it in. Gabe’s would-be killers were still out there, somewhere.
With a last admonishment to stay the hell away from Gabe Monihan, her two interrogators left her standing alone on the steps of the Pentagon. Dang, it was cold today! She pulled her leather duster more tightly around herself, huddling into its not-quite-warm-enough folds.
Before long, a black luxury sedan pulled up and a driver in a chauffeur’s uniform stepped out. “Miss Lockworth?” he asked.
She didn’t recognize the guy. Not her grandfather’s usual driver. But then, maybe the CIA had assigned Jens to a real job in the agency. She gave him grief about his plush assignment every time she saw him.
She stepped forward, smiling. “That’s me. I’m Diana Lockworth.” She held out a friendly hand. The driver looked surprised, but took the offered handshake. “Darryl,” he mumbled.
“Hi, Darryl. Let’s blow this Popsicle stand, shall we? I need to get downtown. Down near the Mall and the parade route for the inauguration,” she said, referring to the long grassy section of the city that stretched from the Lincoln Memorial all the way to the Capitol Building.
“Coming right up, ma’am,” he replied. He held the door for her as she climbed in and shut it firmly behind her. As he pulled away from the curb he asked, “Would you like some music, ma’am?”
“No thanks,” she replied. “I need to do a little thinking.”
The driver nodded silently. She was surprised when a blacked-out privacy glass came up out of the back of the front seat, closing her off from any further conversation with Darryl. Gramps must have a new car to go along with the new driver.
As they headed toward downtown Washington, D.C., she had no specific destination in mind. She just knew she had to head down to where Gabe was going to be in a few hours. For that’s surely where the Q-group would be, as well.
She replayed the interrogation by the Army Intelligence officers in her head. Who was the informant? Had the two intelligence officers revealed anything to her, said anything, that would give her
a clue as to who’d set her up like that?
Was there a chance the incident was connected in some way to the Q-group and its assassination attempt on Gabe? The idea was ridiculous. Except the timing of it was just so blasted suspicious.
Who could be working against her like this? Or maybe the question was better stated, Who inside the government was working against Gabe Monihan like this? An image of a high, sloping forehead under black-and-silver hair and piercing, furious eyes popped into her head. Was it possible? Had Thomas Wolfe set her up? She wouldn’t put it past the man. He’d struck her as having nerves of ice and steel. And she had no doubt he was capable of arranging her arrest, or at least detention.
Of course, Wolfe undoubtedly hadn’t done the dirty work himself. He’d probably had a flunkie call CID and make the accusations against her. She could probably track down the phone records of the call and find out exactly who’d made the call. Where was Oracle when a girl really needed it?
She might not have Oracle here, but she could certainly try to think like Oracle. Okay. Her dislike of Wolfe aside, who else inside the government might have a reason to stop her from foiling an assassination attempt on Gabe? For whoever that person was, she’d lay down good money that he was behind, or at least involved in, the upcoming assassination attempt. Of course, the very idea of an assassination attempt from inside the government was outrageous. But that was her job. To imagine the outrageous and then plan for it.
Any person out to kill Gabe would have to be very high up in the government to benefit from Gabe’s death. They’d need to have passionate opinions about certain foreign policies that lay in direct opposition to Gabe’s. They’d have to have access to the intelligence community. How else would an old CIA scenario have turned up with a bunch of terrorists, and how else could Army Intel have been sicced on her so quickly?
She ticked off the list of requirements for the ringleader of any plot to kill Gabe. High-level government official. Ultraconservative or ultraliberal politics. Access to the intelligence community. Wealth enough to finance the historically destitute Q-group. Access to resources in the form of high-tech equipment or training.
