by S. D. Skye
A couple of hours later, J.J. and Tony collected their neatly organized material into a file and locked it in her briefcase for safe keeping. MacDonald, the man who held the collective fate of the operation in his hands, stayed in the office late and had been expecting their death by PowerPoint. So they said their Hail Marys and prepared to talk shit like they’d never talked it before—Tony’s specialization without question.
As J.J. and Tony headed toward his car, she couldn’t shake the eerie feeling she experienced every time she thought about Cartwright’s suicide and what it really meant. There was a reason he killed himself. He must’ve been entangled in activities so insidious that his only way out was death. The prospect of having to disentangle the web of lies and deceit he’d left behind was nothing short of daunting.
“So what do you think about this Cartwright business?” J.J. asked Tony.
He shrugged. “One way to get out of taking a polygraph, I guess.”
“Be serious, Tony. Do you think he did it because of his sexual preference or for some other reason?” She hoped Cartwright’s death had raised the same questions in his mind that it had in her own.
“Look J.J., you and me, we’re old school. Didn’t your mother ever tell you not to go asking questions you didn’t want to know the answers to?” he asked rhetorically. “I remember one Christmas, my mother gave me this knit sweater with Rudolf the Red-nosed Reindeer on the front.”
She stopped in her tracks and glared at him. “Is this going somewhere?”
“Yeah. Be patient,” he snapped playfully. “As I was sayin’, I hated that ugly ass sweater but I was gonna wear the thing to make her happy. Anyway, there was this one little thread sticking out of the sleeve. I kept pulling and before I knew it, the whole sweater was nothing but a pile o’ yarn.”
“And your point is?”
“My point is, you and I keep pulling strings.”
She laughed and shot him a sideways glance. “Are we still talking about the case?”
His cheeks blushed red. “Of course. What else would I be talking about?” he asked. “That’s what this Cartwright business feels like to me. We’ve pulled the strings and now a bunch of shit is starting to unravel.” He turned to J.J. “What if we’ve uncovered a network? Given the intelligence in Plotnikov’s drop, there’s at least one more ICE Phantom. And he’s not inside the FBI.”
“A spy ring,” she said. Speaking the words made her cringe.
Finding the mole had been task enough. She shuddered for the Agent who would be assigned to find the others.
“Well, we do have one last iron in the fire that might provide us with some added leverage,” J.J. said.
“What’s that?”
“Chris is supposed to take his polygraph first thing tomorrow morning, and I’m pretty sure he’ll show up to take it.”
“No doubt,” Tony said. “If the Russians value him as much as they should, they probably trained him to use countermeasures. He probably won’t beat it, but he’ll be just cocky enough to think he can.”
“He’ll make the drop early in the morning and we’ll get a confession sometime tomorrow. He may be able to tell us more about the ring, but the Russians are among the best at compartmenting their assets, so there are no guarantees.”
“Indeed. Now, let’s roll over to WFO and kiss MacDonald’s ass for twenty minutes so we can get the Gs. This entire op is riding on his thumbs up.”
His metaphor, pulling strings, could perfectly describe their case and relationship. They constantly pulled strings. And the more they pulled, the more their attraction for one another was revealed. But neither dared to face the connection between them—nor the rabbit hole they’d been chased into because of the case.
• • •
Later Wednesday Night...
“It’s on like popcorn!” J.J. said, bubbling with excitement. After presenting their case to SAC MacDonald, he authorized seven G teams for one day and one day only. Either they’d catch the son of a bitch on Thursday or Operation OVER.
After picking up the package of passage material to fill the drop, they set out to find the bug in Jack’s office. As they stepped off the elevator, they faced a new nightmare—one with the power to put the kibosh on their best-laid plans.
“Ahhhh, Ms. McCall and Mr. Donato. I just left your office. I’ve been looking for you two,” Director Freeman said. His scowl could slice through concrete. Neither he nor the members of the director’s security detail looked pleased to see them. J.J. braced herself for his wrath, fearing MacDonald had called and ratted them out. And a quick glance at Tony’s expression said he was doing the same. He’d come to fire them on the spot, snatch their badges and guns and march them out the front exit. The jig was up.
“Sir?” they said in unison. Tony and J.J. glanced at each other unable to gauge his disposition. J.J. was all but certain her career would end in T-minus thirty seconds. After a few moments of uncomfortable silence, he waved off his security detail and told them he’d meet them at his office later.
“Mhm. Hmm. Yeah...I got a call from MacDonald. He said I might find you two here.”
“Sir...uhhh,” J.J. hemmed and hawed. “We...uhhh, uhhh. We didn’t—”
“Apparently you didn’t realize that SAC MacDonald couldn’t authorize such a significant number of surveillance resources without my knowledge...and more importantly, my approval,” he said, gesturing his hand forward as he started toward their office. They humbly followed in tow. “What I’d like to know is why you didn’t come directly to me?”
J.J. looked at Tony and shrugged, gave him a blank stare, and offered nothing in the way of an excuse. After all, Tony was the better improviser of the two. “Well, see. What had happened was . . . Uh, sir, we were trying to keep the information as safe and as compartmented as possible. J.J. identified another problem and we had no idea how extensive the breach might be,” Tony said as they arrived at the office door. He unlocked the cipher and badged everyone in. “If you’ll give us a few minutes, we can show you exactly what we’re talking about. I think you’ll understand.”
“Yes, have a seat, sir,” J.J. said as she flipped on the light, confident Tony’s excuse would get them off the hook. No way Freeman could argue with a fear of bugs—the transmitting type.
Jack’s office had been left virtually undisturbed since their last meeting. They immediately dove into their sweep, ran their hands along the chairs, window sills, and the file safe, carefully inspecting each item on Jack’s desk. Tony crouched down behind the wooden mass and felt underneath. J.J. watched and winced. With Jack, anything could lie beneath.
Toward the back underside, Tony’s fingers brushed across two thin plastic-coated wires. Barely an inch away was a second small, flat object. “Bingo! I got it,” he yelled. “Son of a bitch!” spilled from his mouth before he remembered Freeman was sitting only a few feet away. “You nailed it, J.J.”
He yanked the small device from underneath the desk, held it out for J.J. to inspect. She shook her head and examined the wires. When Tony showed Director Freeman, his body stiffened before he propped his elbows on his knees. Then he tilted back in his seat, his face tired, drawn.
“You mean this bastard placed a bug in headquarters?”
“Yes, sir. That’s why we had to be careful,” J.J. said. “Karat’s been detained, and I’m sure you’ve heard about what happened to Vorobyev by now. The CIA probably can’t wait to get me off the streets.”
He nodded. “I’m supposed to deliver your head on a spike by Friday.”
She chuckled. “Well, we believe that’s how the mole got the information that falsely implicated Vorobyev, a discussion Tony and I had about Dmitriyev.”
“Dmitriyev? Why would you be discussing Dmitriyev? He’s not working with us.”
“Uhhhh...that’s inaccurate,” Tony interjected. “Not only did J.J. recruit him a few days ago, long story. But he’s slated to replace Vorobyev and had intended to identify the ICE Phantom when provi
ded access to Vorobyev’s files on Friday.”
“The mole’s identity? He’s handing it over this Friday?” Director Freeman said, on the edge of elated relief.
“Well, he’d planned to. But that was before Golikov’s people detained Vorobyev,” Tony said. “Now he’s spooked. Apparently Golikov’s people are running security now and Vorobyev got roughed up pretty bad.”
Freeman cut his eyes at both. “And of course you couldn’t report this due to...”
“The bugs,” J.J. said, cutting her eyes at Tony. “We have no idea how extensive the breaches are or where else in the building he may have planted devices. So we had to be careful.”
“Shit, this is a sensitive compartmented facility,” Freeman said. “You do realize that for the transmitter to work inside a SCIFed area they had to listen from inside the office. No way they could pick up a signal from the street.”
“Well, sir. There are twenty-two people working in this office, at least eight of which have access to the vault. We’ll find out which one is involved tomorrow, if you allow us to go forward with the op.”
He nodded and let out a long sigh. “In the meantime, I’m ordering security to sweep this entire building. They can start tonight before our perceptive employees arrive in the morning and rumors become another distraction.”
He stood and patted Tony’s shoulder before walking to the door. “Let me get home before my wife threatens to divorce me...for the second time this week. You two get some shuteye. You’ve got important work to do tomorrow and we’re all counting you.”
“Yes, sir,” Tony said. He secured the door behind him.
J.J. and Tony glanced at each other, relieved. Their shoulders sagged and breathing calmed. Although they’d made some significant progress, they were far from in the clear.
“Whew! That was a close one,” J.J. said. “You know I got to thinking if the device is here, nine times out of ten, the receiver is here too.”
Without hesitation, she walked straight to Chris’s desk. Both Lana and Jack had suspected he was dirty. Maybe he’d left the evidence to prove it. She opened he desk drawers, one after the other. Scouring through his office supplies. Looking for anything that appeared unusual or out of place. Any kind of electronic that could be used as a receiver. When she reached the bottom drawer, she saw it. An iPod with a flash drive embedded in the rear casing. She turned it on, but the display didn’t operate normally. The backlight glowed on, but no menu appeared. She examined the seams along the edges.
This has been opened.
She held it up in Tony’s view. “I’ll bet you ten-to-one this is it. Probably uses the flash drive to save the recordings. I’ll take this to security and let them scan it.”
“Chris. Rat piece of shit.”
“Come hell or high water, he’ll get his comeuppance before the day’s end.”
“Indeed.”
The look in Tony’s eye said he was now in it for the long haul. Sink or sail, they were in the same boat. She loaded the briefcase and scanned the office. One way or another, the office would never be the same. And two days might spell the end of her ten-year career.
“Listen, I was wondering if I could stay at your place tonight...on the couch, of course. We gotta be in the park by 5 am and my place is farther from the city than yours.”
She hesitated to answer out of more than her fear of love; she’d made a promise to Tony she hadn’t kept. “Hmmm. Is this because you don’t want to drive...or because you want to keep an eye on me...or because you want to keep a hand on me?”
“Maybe all of the above,” Tony said, a smile seizing his lips. “Okay, just the first two. Whadaya say?”
J.J.’s skepticism and stress level were both on overdrive. Maybe with the security of Tony’s presence she could finally get a good night’s rest. Her biggest fear was, of course that neither of them would sleep. She and Tony sacking out in her condo was the definition of pulling strings, and Tony was yanking the hell out of them. Perhaps he didn’t grasp the full gravity of his suggestion. Maybe he believed they could resist temptation despite their innermost desires. Or maybe he realized the other night could have destroyed their friendship and he decided to reverse course and suppress his feelings. Or...maybe he knew the position he was putting them in and his desire surpassed all reason. This could mean trouble for the both of them. Big trouble.
But, after all, trouble was J.J.’s middle name.
Chapter 36
Wednesday Night…
Tony stared helplessly at the shelf containing a mishmash of cable boxes and receivers. He had no idea he’d need an engineering degree to turn on the television.
“How do you turn on the TV.?” he called out.
“You’ve been here twenty minutes and already you wanna take over the remote controls,” she said exiting her bedroom. J.J. had scuttled away to put on her pajamas as soon as they crossed the threshold, nearly overheating at the thought of a man spending an entire night in her home. After all, she was no spring chicken and it had been a while since she’d been locked in with someone for whom she cared so deeply.
“You mean all twenty of them? No, I’m a one-remote kinda guy,” he said. “I’d just like to watch the NFL channel. They’re replaying Sunday’s Jets-Patriots game that I missed thanks to Mr. Dmitriyev.”
J.J. walked to the shelf and turned on everything in about ten seconds, shaking her head at his technical ineptitude.
“Men!”
“Can I get a beer?”
“Sure, they’re in the refrigerator. I’ll have one too while you’re at it.” She grabbed the briefcase containing the files and plunked them down on the couch. He gave her a look that said “I wish I could kick your ass back to the 1950s.”
She snickered and jumped up to grab one from the icebox, returning seconds later. She placed them atop coasters on the coffee table. “Here you go! Do you want me to throw your clothes in the washer? I pulled out some of my brother’s old gym stuff and laid them on the bed if you want to change. You guys are about the same size.”
“That’ll work. Appreciate the offer,” he said as he headed for the bedroom. “Now while I’m changing, no peeking!”
“Don’t worry, I don’t need to…,” she said, “…the camera’s running.”
She grabbed a stack of paperwork from the dining room table and planted herself in a seat at the end of couch furthest from Tony.
He returned just few minutes later, dressed in a pair of Lakers’ basketball shorts and a matching sleeveless T-shirt, exposing everything J.J. prayed hid beneath his clothes but that she hadn’t seen in the flesh. Now she wanted to devour him in every heavenly way imaginable.
Lord have mercy on me! she thought to herself. Jesus be the Great Wall of China!
She pushed the hot, sweaty thoughts of a forbidden night with him from her mind; her skin grew flush. She glanced away, moving her gaze from the T.V., to the floor, to the ticking clock outside the kitchen, anything was better than dealing with the surge of emotions overwhelming her as she looked at him.
“You all right?”
“Uhhhh...yeah. I’m fine.” Without realizing it, she fanned herself with a file folder. “Is it warm in here? I think I need to crack open a window.” She popped up and slid open the patio door a few inches to the left.
Tony noticed her flustered appearance and chuckled. “Maybe, you better have a sip of your beer. It’ll cool you down.” He grabbed both bottles and clasped them between his fingers before opening them. Then he held one out for her. The curve in his pecks called to her as he reached out his arm.
She trembled inside. Only a cold shower or a warm bed could offer the kind of cooling she needed. “Salut. Here’s to a few sips of beer,” she said as their bottle clinked together. “Now. On your next visit, you are no longer a guest. You can get your own beer...and mine too while you’re at it.” She returned to her seat at the sofa’s edge. She wanted him, to feel him inside her, to press her body against his, but life was t
oo complicated and her fears too stifling.
“Next visit, huh?” He looked at her and winked.
“Careful, Tony. You’re pulling strings again.”
In one swift motion too fast for J.J. to react to or comprehend, Tony emptied his seat and appeared in the one next to her. Unnerved, her mouth fell slightly open. She planned to run, but he grabbed her forearm before she could flinch. “Hear me out,” he said tilting his face toward hers. To fight him would be a futile exercise. She knew it. And he knew it. “We’ve been, you know, pulling strings for a long time now. I don’t know about you, but I’m kind of liking what I see. Maybe pulling strings ain’t such a bad thing.”
“I’m not sure what you’re trying to say.” She stared at her knees wondering how long it would take her to fall if she tried to stand.
He craned his neck, tried to draw her gaze to his face, but her eyes remained fixed on her knees instead; they were harmless. They could convince her of nothing.
“I’m saying...I’m saying that we have a lot of reasons to fight against this ‘thing’ between us—our families, society...ourselves. But when I see your smile, I don’t see a black woman. I see my life. Everything in here,” he pressed his hand to his heart, “tells me to deal with the bullshit and fight for you...for us.”
She gasped and placed her hand over her mouth. Finally, he’d spoken the words she’d longed to pass his beautiful Italian lips. She wanted so much to reach out to him, to melt away in his arms. But their lives were too complicated, love too unpredictable, and society too unaccepting. Perhaps her wounds from the debacle with Six had yet to heal. Maybe she needed to tend to her own unfinished business before starting something new. Or maybe, for a change, she could stop thinking with her head and leap with her heart. She shuffled the files around nervously on her lap, disturbing the pregnant silence as she fished for a response.
“Well?” Tony asked, his eyes still chasing hers.
