Voyager

by Carl Rackman

  Ferguson mulled this over for a few moments more. “If you can get me proof these conspirators are planning an assassination, or at the very least something to tie them to Voyager and your hit on the British agent, I promise we’ll put our full resources behind your operation. But your presence must remain secret. You and me. No one else.”

  “No one else knows except Brad. You have my word.”

  “Show me the proof, and we have a deal.”

  “You’ll have it by 1300 hours today. But I need Barnes to come with me.” She flashed Brad a look.

  Ferguson was less convinced. “Barnes? He’s exhausted. He shouldn’t even be in work, never mind running round in the field.”

  “He does okay. Besides, he’s the only one I trust.”

  “Trust isn’t a one-way street, Ms Jones. You shot him in the face, I seem to remember. Why should we trust you?”

  Brad interjected, “Sir, please. Time is running out. I can handle this.”

  Ferguson looked doubtful; he held the moment in his hands. At a word, he could pull the plug and have Alex arrested, regardless of her story and the interference of the mysterious Mr Josephson.

  “Okay, Ms Jones. Then we have an agreement.”

  Alex stood, even taller in a power suit and heels, and reached out a long arm to shake hands. “I’ll be in touch soon, Mr Ferguson.”

  Ferguson watched her leave. Brad was about to follow her, but the senior agent called him back. “Just a minute, Agent Barnes.”

  Alex nodded to him and let the door close behind her.

  Ferguson picked up the phone and dialled a three number internal extension.

  “Berkoff.”

  “It’s Ferguson. Did you get all that?”

  “Every word. Is she for real?”

  “I’ll know by thirteen hundred hours today, I guess.”

  “Just between us, sir, I’m not sure about this. She didn’t deny murdering our people,” said Berkoff.

  “Keep that recording safe, John. We’re going to need the leverage.”

  “Roger that, sir.”

  After replacing the phone he switched off the mic concealed in his desk ornament, a fake stone plaque commemorating an award.

  Brad was uneasy. “I sure hope you know what you’re doing, sir.”

  Ferguson eyed him doubtfully. “I could ask you the same question. She shot you in the head, or did you lose that particular memory, son? You two seem awfully close for a murderer and victim.”

  Brad reddened. “I told you I felt we had a connection. I brought her in, didn’t I?”

  “Well, Agent, I just let her walk out of here. I’m going to trust your judgement on how far you think you can work together. Just in case, I’m putting Berkoff and Savage on both your asses until I’m satisfied she isn’t going to blow up in my face like last time.”

  “Me and…Ms Jones. We’re a partnership now, sir. And believe me when I say she has unique skills. I want her to have a chance to prove herself.”

  Ferguson sighed. “Berkoff and Savage are clean, Brad. They’re mine. I trust them. I don’t want the Jones woman off the leash during a potential assassination attempt.”

  “I’m not going to tell you to lose the recording, sir, I’m not that corny. But you wouldn’t want to make an enemy of her. I told her you were one of the good guys. I’m telling you I believe she’s with us now.”

  “Brad. Just get me the proof.”

  “We’re on it, sir.”

  Alex pulled up outside a brownstone apartment block on the Upper East Side just before 1130. She was driving a silver Mercedes-Benz. When she climbed out, she was the lawyerly woman about town still toting her power suit; her heels now replaced by high-end training shoes. With purpose, she strode across the paved sidewalk towards the twin columns of doorbells in the arched entryway. Snow still clung where the drifts had piled up along the walls; the sidewalks were slick with melted frost.

  Brad remembered their last foray together in New York – how he’d strived to keep up with her and tried in vain to impress her. Now things felt very different.

  Her breath puffed in steamy billows as she scanned the rows until she found the button she was looking for.

  “Brad, when we take this step, the game is really on. Supra would have been suspicious since Mexico. They’d believe I was taken prisoner. But as soon as this goes down, they’ll know I’ve turned. They’ll be hunting me down from now on. It’s important you understand that.”

  “Okay.” He guessed as much.

  “That means all the surveillance and operational management I need falls on you. You’re all I have from now on.”

  “I understand, Alex.”

  “So this had better work. We have to work together. You need to be talking to me constantly to give me the edge I need. Get it wrong, and I could be dead and the world is screwed.” She smiled. “No pressure, Barnes.”

  “It’s going to work, Alex.” He watched as she straightened her shoulders.

  “Let’s get to work. Up there in apartment thirty-four is Dima. He’s the Triumvirate’s cyber-ops guy. They call him the Keymaster. He’s Russian. A hacking genius. He’s the guy who hacked the FBI for our Queens operation. He’s probably being guarded, but not closely. So get yourself set up. When it’s all clear, I’ll move.”

  “What’s your entry plan?”

  “I’ll let myself in. But first, I’m just going to knock. I need to let them know who they’re up against. Call it a professional courtesy.”

  Brad gave her an uncertain look before letting himself into the apartment block using a skeleton key. The Bureau had already isolated an empty apartment on the second floor beneath their target - he was going to set up his surveillance from there. First he had to case the third floor corridor while trying to appear innocuous.

  With his laptop bag and holdall, he hopefully looked like any city jerk returning home. He wore work clothes and a beanie hat covering his scar. Unfortunately, he wasn’t sure how well he was bearing up on the inside. He was severely out of shape, his headache still pounded and he needed distraction to stop it from monopolising his attention.

  He took the elevator up to the third floor. He turned the corner, and then pretended he’d got off on the wrong floor, feigning surprise for the benefit of anyone watching. His hesitation gave him time to attach a miniature remote surveillance camera directly beneath the fire alarm bell pull.

  He also got a good view of a relatively young, muscular maintenance man. Wearing coveralls and a tool belt, he stood over an open work bag near the corner of the corridor leading from the elevators. He appeared to be changing the light switch, but he hadn’t proceeded further than removing the faceplate and now seemed to be on a break. He had the same wiry, lean build as the special ops guys Brad worked with on the Fly Team. He glared at Brad, looking him up and down in a professional appraisal. Brad waved apologetically and headed back to the elevator.

  He called Alex quietly on their intercom. “Looks like just one guy in the corridor disguised as a maintenance man. I haven’t seen inside the apartment yet. Wall camera is active.”

  He let himself into his base apartment one floor down. The rooms were empty of furniture apart from ladders and benches used by the decorators. One side was a bedroom, which led to a toilet and shower room. The other space was a living room-slash-kitchen backing on to a small utility and bathroom.

  Brad set up his laptop and quickly tapped into his camera. It gave him an uninterrupted view from the elevator exit to the apartment door. The maintenance guy was still loitering and not carrying out much work on the open panel. It was a safe bet he was the muscle.

  Brad looked more closely. “Alex, I’m casing the maintenance guy. He’s got a large semi-automatic in his tool belt. Looks like a Desert Eagle. He’s covering the elevator and the corridor.”

  “What does he look like?”

  “Medium height, muscular, lean, dark hair, brown eyes. Looks like a special ops soldier.”

  She
chuckled. “Good guess, Barnes.”

  “Is he Supra?”

  “No, just an ex-special ops minder. He’s looking after Dima. They’re usually just bodyguards. We wouldn’t waste Supra on babysitting. Besides, they wouldn’t expect anyone to come after Dima.”

  Brad tapped into the small camera for the entry phone. “Eyes are live. I can see you.”

  Alex towered in the entrance filling the whole field of view. She gave a quick okay sign. “Do you have eyes on the apartment yet?”

  “Negative. I’m on it.” He stood up on the decorating platform in the corner of the living room and drilled carefully and quietly through the ceiling until he could feed a flexible probe through the hole into the apartment above.

  He saw a similarly laid-out apartment, but the living room was darkened and filled with computer equipment, most of which was beyond Brad’s rudimentary office knowledge.

  In front of the largest computer screen was a wide-shouldered, fleshy man in a wife-beater top that showed his hairy back and shoulders. He looked like a bear. He wore a sweatband around his head, which held his long hair back from his face, while his large Beats headphones rested on top. He sat forward in an expensive-looking office chair. His hands moved rapidly from the keyboard to the mouse and back as he surged through lines of code on the large screen.

  Brad immediately reported back to Alex. “There’s a big guy in here with a lot of computers. He’s got a real hairy back.”

  “That’s him. Watch him for me.”

  The apartment bell rang loudly. The man ignored it, or he didn’t hear. Brad relayed this to Alex. She rang again and held down the button making an insistent and piercing noise.

  Eventually the guy tapped an adjacent screen and brought up the doorbell view. He gave a double take and zoomed in on Alex’s face. An expletive flew from his lips. He ripped the headphones away, pushed back from the desk and fumbled to the side to pull out a large semi-automatic pistol.

  “He recognised you, and it doesn’t look like he’s preparing a friendly welcome, Alex.”

  “It’s okay. Just let me know where he is.”

  The computer guy was now crouching in the bathroom, his hairy back to the wall and pointing the chunky automatic towards the open door. He was concealed, but not covered, wedged between an overflowing laundry basket and a washing machine. He would have been invisible from the entrance door but he had a good shooting position for anyone coming through it. He fumbled a phone from his jeans back pocket while crouching and began typing a text one-handed.

  Brad relayed all of this to Alex while shifting his view to the corridor. He heard the chirp of an electronic notification and saw the maintenance guy whip out his phone.

  “Alex, I think Dima just alerted the guy in the corridor.”

  Brad saw the maintenance man switching to high alert. He slipped the pistol from his belt and peeked around the corner of the wall towards the elevator, which had just begun humming to life.

  “He’s covering the corner to the immediate left of the elevators.” Brad could sense the bodyguard’s tension. He saw the urgent body language of the man as he looked up and back along the corridor, occasionally stealing a glance behind him to check the path to the apartment door.

  “Okay, Barnes. I need to keep quiet for a second.”

  The elevator arrived with a sharp ting and the doors lazily rolled open. The minder, focused on the movement, drew a bead with his gun.

  Brad sensed a blur as Alex rushed silently but with bewildering speed from the stairwell door behind. She cracked the man’s head against the wall where he squatted before he’d even registered her movement.

  The gun dropped heavily to the carpeted floor, immediately followed by the senseless form of the soldier.

  She dragged him by his belt with one hand, hefted the tool bag with the other and threw them both into the elevator, leaving the body half in-and-out to jam the doors.

  “He’s okay, Barnes. He’ll be out of the game for a couple of weeks with that concussion, but he’ll live.”

  Brad didn’t answer, but he was very relieved she hadn’t killed him. He felt she might yet be redeemed from the brutal habits that had defined her for the preceding decades.

  As if she was reading his mind, she added, “Don’t think I’m going soft. I just do enough to get the job done. Now, where’s Dima?”

  Brad looked back into the apartment. “He’s still crouching in the bathroom. He’s about twenty feet from the door to the right of the entrance. He’s holding the gun right-handed, phone in his other hand but he isn’t talking.”

  “Okay, Barnes. Keep me informed on his exact position.”

  Brad watched the man in the bathroom intently. His gun hand trembled slightly, but it remained pointed towards the door. He could see the lit phone screen in his other hand.

  “He’s still making a call, but he’s alert.”

  “I’m going in.”

  At that exact instant, the apartment door came crashing in and Alex burst into the bedroom.

  Dima dropped the phone and tensed on the trigger, but didn’t shoot.

  Brad saw her a second later sidestepping the computer room door and ducking immediately out of Dima’s line of sight before the shocked man could even register. Brad – and he guessed Dima, too – had never seen a human being move so fast.

  “Where?” she hissed.

  “He’s crouching about two feet from the door. He’s holding the gun out in front of him. You should be able to—”

  Her hand snaked around from behind the bathroom wall in a blur and grabbed Dima’s gun hand, yanking it with brutal force. The full bulk of the hapless man lurched forward from his crouch; his face crashed into the doorjamb. Alex maintained her solid grip and squeezed his wrist, forcing the gun to clatter to the floor. It was over in a few seconds.

  Dima groaned, clutching his broken nose, all thought of defence forgotten.

  Alex stepped over him to grab his phone, which she then smashed into the tiled bathroom wall and broke what was left into pieces before throwing the battery down the toilet.

  “Hi, Dima.”

  “What – why is Supra here? What has Dima done?” His voice sounded thick and muffled from under his hand, the blood bubbling from his lips. “You come to kill Dima? Why?”

  Alex grabbed him by the straps of his top and roughly hauled him upright. “I need the details of the Voyager lowjack from last year. I need to be able to prove when and how it was done. I need the data and transmission locations, duration and frequencies. Then I want the names and addresses of the people who did it. Right now.”

  Dima’s eyes, clouded with pain, darted in surprise. “Why do you not just call Dima? Why come here? You scare Dima to the death!”

  Alex said nothing.

  “You are Supra, yes? I have seen you.”

  She twisted her hand tightening the grip on his shoulder strap. “I’m here on my own, Dima. I’m taking them down.” Her voice was soft, but with the growling undertone when she meant business.

  Dima’s eyes widened in panic. “You are crazy! I can’t do it. They kill me!”

  “I don’t have time, Dima. You know where to find it. If I have to find it myself, I will. It’ll just take longer.”

  His eyes narrowed. “You are traitor? You try to blackmail masters?”

  Alex tightened her mouth. “Tick-tock, Dima.”

  “You are crazy! They kill us both! You leave me, run now, Dima says nothing, I swear!”

  Alex sighed as if frustrated by a slow-witted child. “Dima, you need to see the big picture. If I’m here, then it’s not your day – it’s over for you either way. I’m taking down the Triumvirate. On my own if I have to. I’m offering you a way out, if you want it. Otherwise, you’re going to die. And I’m on the clock, so I don’t care if I have to kill you myself or leave you to Supra.”

  She dragged him over to the computer. “Whether or not you were directly involved, you know where to find the records I need. I’l
l give you two minutes. After that, if I’m not happy, it’s bye-bye, Dima. Clear?”

  He blinked, squirming. “Dima can do it. But now you take me with you. Or masters kill me!”

  “I give you my word. As long as you work fast enough.”

  Dima hunched back over the computer with his nose bright red and sniffing back blood. He worked with surprising speed checking back through his files until he found the remote directory he was looking for.

  “Tvoyuzh mat!” Dima’s exclamation was not a sign of good news. “Vot chert!” The Russian suddenly began clicking furiously, triggering several subroutines simultaneously.

  “What is it?” Evidently Alex wasn’t as proficient in computer hacking as she was in most other things.

  “They lock down system. Dima must try…” He trailed off, the effort of speaking English proving too much when set against the battle of wills on his computer screens.

  “Blin!” Dima had the file structure tree open in front of him. After rapidly selecting the files they needed, he batch copied them to his hard drive. He chuckled as they verified. “Dima is very good. Hard drive is on local access only. Masters close the server, but Dima too fast!”

  Alex patted him on his broad, hairy back. “Good job. Let’s get you out of here.”

  She turned aside and murmured to Brad, “Scout ahead. Inside and out.” She then said firmly to Dima, “Stay right behind me. Don’t change your mind, or you’ll die here. Got it?”

  Dima gingerly touched his nose. “I am coming. But Dima does not come cheap.”

  Alex tossed her head impatiently. “Dima comes alive. That should be enough. Or I could leave you to explain to Supra why you helped me.”

  Dima stuffed the hard drive and a laptop into a very worn rucksack with a heavy sigh. “Lady, you bring much trouble.”

  Alex smiled. “You have no idea. And make sure you put your coat on.”

  Brad reported, “Stairwell is clear. No cars waiting outside. Fire escapes clear.”

  Alex took Dima by the coat sleeve and led him to the shattered doorway. She looked both ways up and down the corridor before briskly leading the Russian out.