Oracle's Hunt

by A. Claire Everward

  Even before the place was cleared, Donovan canvassed it quickly. The computers and screens that filled the area immediately beyond the entrance were barely recognizable, having been at the center of the fire. The human remains beside them worried him. The body was no longer recognizable, but a quick check told him that it was a man, with what looked like a bullet hole in the back of his head. Donovan squatted down beside him, looked at his position, the position of the technology. He was willing to bet this was Elijahn’s technology expert. The guy responsible for the hacking, perhaps the one he had seen in the data center break-in footage connecting to the IDSD storage unit and stealing the data.

  He contemplated the converted space around him. Abruptly, he stood up and walked to what he knew to be the parking area. Empty. He crossed behind it, to the back of the warehouse. The fire didn’t get a chance to destroy this area, the material of the soundproof structure that dominated the floor, standing between it and the heart of the fire, serving as a hindrance. There were sleeping bags piled up in one corner here, and a makeshift kitchenette. He crossed back and entered the soundproof area. A lot of scattered ammo on the floor, which Elijahn hadn’t bothered to destroy. It wouldn’t tell him anything new, he already knew where Elijahn’s firearms came from. He squatted down and picked up a shell casing. It was the type he expected it to be, what his contact had told him. For a selective-fire gun. He scanned the others quickly. Most were the same, some were for a handgun, the same type of bullets found in the bodies of the data center guards.

  He stood up and strode out. Anything else here his people would analyze. But he doubted it would help. DNA would probably lead either to a dead end or to untraceable militants in international databases. There might be hits if Elijahn had added to the manpower available to him for his plan by using local hires, but Donovan figured they would all either be found dead or disappear before this was over. What did interest him were the cars whose traces he had seen in the parking area. The tire tracks and what must have been a brush with the corner of a wall indicated dark and heavy harsh terrain vehicles. Four, maybe five, he couldn’t be sure. Elijahn could have more people, more vehicles, more of whatever he needed for his plan stocked elsewhere, but none of the searches Donovan had initiated had shown any indication of that, and in any case, he didn’t think so. Elijahn wanted control. After the destruction of his base, he would have become obsessed with it. He would keep everything, everyone close. This site, Donovan was willing to wager that this was it.

  And Elijahn would want to be present during the attack. Donovan’s stride quickened. To be sure, just in case Elijahn was playing it smart and was somehow still listening, he waited until he was out of the warehouse before he made the call, motioning for his techs to go in and get to work. He himself was already heading to his car, which one of his junior investigators, not yet cleared for field agent duties that would have allowed him to participate in the raid, had driven over, and that was now standing with the other USFID vehicles down the street.

  An empty warehouse, a dead tech guy, destroyed computers. Elijahn didn’t need them anymore. We’re too late, I’m too late, Donovan kept thinking.

  Elijahn was already on the attack.

  He knew where Lara was. So his first call was to the protective detail of another name on the list Elijahn took, Dr. Bernard Miles.

  “All is quiet here, Agent Pierce,” the agent who answered him said in a calm voice.

  “Looks like Elijahn is getting ready to attack, so keep your eyes open. IDSD will be sending you backup, and we’ll have local law enforcement assist as required.”

  “Sir? I don’t understand.” The agent sounded confused. “How would Elijahn get here?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “We’re not in DC, we haven’t been there since last night. Our orders were to move Dr. Miles and his family to an undisclosed location.” The agent was trained well enough not to specify the place, even though the call was secure and Donovan had been cleared by IDSD.

  “Whose orders?”

  “Head of Security Ericsson, under Vice Admiral Scholes’s order, sir. We were instructed to stay away until we are contacted by either of them when it’s over.”

  Donovan thought quickly. “Okay. Keep them indoors and keep an eye out for anything out of the ordinary. Shoot first, ask later.”

  Donovan made the same call to the protective details of two more of the people on Elijahn’s list, with the same results. They had been moved the night before, along with their families, under Ericsson and Scholes’s orders. To different locations than Miles. These agents wouldn’t specify their exact locations either, but one of them did mention that all protective details had been doubled.

  So these were three of the possible targets on the list of people Elijahn had information on. Donovan didn’t bother calling the protective details of the remaining names on the list. He already knew what he would find—they too would be safely tucked away somewhere. Normally his first thought might have been that Elijahn had duped them again, and had found a way to move his targets to where he wanted them, but he wouldn’t have scattered them this way. And anyway, this time there was no way he could have done that. IDSD had learned its lesson, and nobody could be more careful.

  And then there was Lara. Donovan knew where she was. And she wasn’t safely hidden far away, she was at IDSD.

  Something played in his mind. Something she had said that morning.

  He reached for his phone again.

  Scholes picked up after one ring. “Been waiting to hear from you. Anything?”

  “Did you order Elijahn’s possible targets taken to safe locations outside the DC metro area?”

  “What?”

  “They were taken away, quite a distance away as a matter of fact. Apparently all except Lara.”

  Donovan heard Scholes shout, “Celia, get me Carl. Now. Hold on a sec, Donovan.”

  He heard the vice admiral talking on another phone. When he came back on, his voice had an edge to it. “You’re right. No one on that list came in today. They got their security, so Ericsson didn’t check on them, he was sure he would have been alerted by the protective details if anything was wrong. And I myself only made sure I know where Lara is.”

  “And?”

  “Ericsson just found orders on his computer. Apparently someone entered them yesterday, remotely, while he was still in his office, but there’s no record of this being done, which is why he wasn’t alerted about it. There seems to be a set of orders for the protective detail of each name on the list Elijahn has, specifying where that person and his or her family should be moved, and how the agents should act, including to speak to no one about their orders, since Elijahn seems to be everywhere, and to avoid checking in with any of us so they wouldn’t be located. And there’s a collective order to increase the protective details of all potential targets, to allow for alternate shifts.” Scholes paused. “The instructions supposedly came directly from Carl, under an order from me.”

  “Except that you didn’t order this. And neither did he.”

  “No. And the protective agents wouldn’t suspect anything. The orders were sent directly to the head of each protective detail as an encrypted message through a designated secure channel, something we do when there’s someone we need to keep hidden, which does happen, as you can imagine. It’s standard procedure for high-risk targets.”

  Donovan closed his eyes. “And the orders covered everyone except Lara.” He thought for a moment. “Frank, does Lara have to be there today?”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Is there anything urgent, a mission, meetings, anything she has to be at IDSD Missions for?”

  “No,” Scholes said. “Nothing much is left open from the last missions. There are pending ones, but she’s at the stage of getting the info on them and some of it is still being prepared. And there are no urgent meetings for today.” He was thinking aloud now. “There’s a diplomatic mission she’s advising, but th
eoretically she could work from home. She’s got a secure connection and a secure laptop she always has with her.”

  “How does she usually work?”

  “You saw how crazy things can get for her. So she’s got full freedom. She can come and go as she pleases. Aiden is here regularly, runs everything for her and is everyone’s direct line to her. If she’s not here and we need her, we call her in. Hell, we started this because she’s not getting enough time off, and with the things she does—”

  “And what would she do on a day like today?” Donovan tried to keep his urgency at bay.

  “If not for Elijahn, and with the days she’s had? Even if she decided to come in for the diplomatic mission—she’d do that if she wanted to have her office or Mission Command to work in just in case, if she thought there was a risk there—she would probably have come in sometime in the early afternoon, sat in on the mission as she did, then she might have wound down with a swim, then gone home straight from the IDSD fitness center.”

  “Except that instead, she arrived in the morning, at about the same time she came in yesterday. I’m betting she intends to leave at about the same time she did yesterday, too,” Donovan said.

  “She’s creating regularity.” Scholes stood up.

  “Nothing like regularity to help someone who is targeting you.” The hollow feeling in the pit of Donovan’s stomach had no bottom. “Frank, why now? Why would she think he would attack now? How would she know?”

  “It’s her, for heaven’s sake!” Scholes exploded, and hit his desk with a closed fist. “She plays the likelihoods in her mind in a different way than you and I do. All this time that we’ve talked around her, let her know everything that’s happening, everything we’re doing, she analyzed it, took it one level up.”

  “She was looking at Elijahn’s file this morning,” Donovan said.

  “Well, I can tell you she had the Chad mission files called up yesterday. I’m looking at her access authorization right now. She did it straight from her office, viewed them all.”

  “I wanted to take her to IDSD this morning, then take her back home when she was done. In my car. She said she wanted to take her own car.”

  “She’s good.” Scholes’s chuckle had no humor in it. “She’s kept us both in the dark.”

  “She actually used the fact that we focused on her. While we were watching her, she was watching us. And we watched her but not what she was doing.” Donovan was stumped. And mad as hell.

  “Worse. She used Oracle against us. This is something Oracle would do. Christ, she must have been planning this for . . .” Scholes sighed. “It wasn’t exactly difficult for her to access Carl’s office system and send those orders. And I’m betting we’ll find that a backing order has in fact been sent from mine. And in the right wording, too. She would have done it from her laptop, it’s probably the most secure thing outside Mission Command, and it’s designed to give her access anywhere without leaving any record of it if that’s what she wants.”

  Donovan cursed under his breath. “She told me.”

  “What?”

  “Yesterday. She came to me. She was angry that she has a protective detail. Told me she won’t risk Elijahn going after the others when it’s her he’s looking for, that it would better if he knows it’s her he wants. I got angry, told her I wouldn’t stand for it. Showed her . . .” that I cared, he didn’t say. That I would do anything to protect her. That she came first.

  “So she did the only thing she could. She made herself available and is pointing him to herself. God, when he comes after her . . .”

  “She’ll let him know she is behind Oracle. So he’ll know he’s got the right person. Frank, where is she? I asked her to wait there until I come to escort her home. Where is she now?”

  “She’s not here.” Scholes was already accessing her data. “We’re too late. She’s left IDSD.” Scholes looked up as Ericsson entered his office.

  “Can you stop her at the gate?” Donovan asked.

  Ericsson heard him. He approached Scholes’s desk screen, used his own access authorization to check. “She’s out. I can beep her car, track it.”

  “Do that, route the tracking data to my phone. Where’s her protective detail?”

  “Here.” Ericsson let out a breath. “They were supposed to be alerted when she leaves the building.”

  “They wouldn’t be.” Donovan guessed what Lara had done. “She took care of that. Just like she didn’t let me take her to IDSD and back. She made sure she would be alone.”

  Ericsson wasn’t listening. “Agent Pierce, the tracking transmitter in her car isn’t working. We’ve lost the signal.”

  Donovan was already driving and breaking every traffic law by now. He turned on the blue lights that would flash along the front of his car. “Could she do that?”

  “No. It had to be someone on the outside. And I can tell you it wasn’t us.”

  Donovan hit the accelerator, even though the car couldn’t give him any more than it already was. “Trace her phone.”

  Ericsson was already doing that.

  “She has an emergency distress signal she can activate, and the ability to connect directly to IDSD with the push of a button or a voice command. If she was in trouble, I’m sure she would . . .” Scholes was frantic. “I can’t believe it. I can’t believe she set herself up. No, what am I saying? Of course she would. She would weigh the odds, but ultimately she wouldn’t allow anyone to get hurt for her even if the odds were against her.”

  “Shit. Oh, shit.” Ericsson breathed in. “We can’t trace her phone. There is no signal for her.”

  “So she can’t get to us.”

  “Worse, I tried to trace her laptop too, the device we’ve put in it just in case. It’s here. She left it in her office. She never does that, ever.”

  “When did she go off the grid?” Donovan’s hands tightened on the steering wheel.

  Ericsson checked. “Minutes.”

  “Last position?”

  Ericsson gave him the coordinates. Donovan hit the accelerator again. “I’m on my way to her, get backup!”

  But he could already hear Scholes. “This is Vice Admiral Francis A. Scholes, ID Two-Lima-Seven-One-Foxtrot-Alfa-Sierra. We are at FPCON Delta. Oracle is under attack.”

  Donovan terminated the call. What he had just heard, these last words, made it real, too terribly real. Fear the likes of which he had never known coursed through his veins, pushing him on.

  Lara.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Lara had wondered what she would be thinking about right about now. After it was over and done with—the analysis, the decision, the planning—that was all that had remained for her to do. Wonder what it would be like to sit in her car, waiting. What she would think about.

  She never imagined she would be thinking about Donovan. She was driving on the familiar road from IDSD to her home, the formidable gate of the complex in which she would have been safe growing smaller behind her, the likelihood of an attack on her increasing with every roll of her car tires. And yet it was Donovan she was thinking about. She wondered how angry he would be at her. If he would wish he had shot her after all—that one brought a smile to her face, even now. She remembered how caring his blue-gray eyes had been when he’d said that last time.

  Caring. The way he held her after the tragedy of the Somalia mission. The way it felt, his touch. How close they had become since, how close they were that very morning. The way he looked at her, how much that look had changed since that time when he had been so angry, raging against her. What she saw in him, felt in him, for her, in his home. The smile faded. He cared. And it wasn’t just his investigation, or Oracle. He cared about her. If she died tonight, what would he feel? Would he hurt? They barely knew each other, just met days before. Surely that wasn’t enough to . . .

  She knew that wasn’t true. It was enough. It was certainly enough for her.

  But there was no other choice. If she didn’t do this, Donovan wo
uld be as much at risk as everybody else around her. More, since he was so protective of her, and would stay close.

  More, if there was anything between them.

  There it was again. It was crazy that she would even consider that, and now, of all times. Except, maybe that was exactly why she could allow herself to think about it, think about him. There was no fear, now. No fear of loving again.

  She could not, would not allow him to be hurt because of her. Not him, not anyone. No matter the price she had to pay.

  In reality, she had analyzed, had taken the leap already the day before. Or rather, Oracle had analyzed and had taken that leap. She knew she had no choice. Both Donovan and Frank were hinting at protective custody, and while there were several possibilities as to what Elijahn would do, the one thing Lara knew was that he would not stop until he believed he had destroyed Oracle. And that meant that as long as he didn’t know for certain who was behind it, others in addition to her were likely to get hurt. The others whose names he had, their protective details, their families. And yes, Donovan, who was getting in Elijahn’s way—the realization that he was heading the raid on Elijahn’s hideout had sent a shock wave through her. Donovan hadn’t chosen to get entangled with Oracle. With her. And she wasn’t about to let him die for it.

  All indications were that Elijahn would attack soon. Indications, and her unique view of them. So she had moved his other potential targets out of the way. All of them, although her analysis had easily shown who was more likely to be hit. She left only herself available to him. Her brow furrowed. She thought about what Donovan might find in Elijahn’s hideout. If maybe, just maybe, Elijahn had already been caught. If she would make it home that night after all.