Double-Cross

by Meredith Fletcher

  The strange thing was, Sam did believe the big man. Now that he was working with her rather than coming after her and taking her into custody, she couldn’t help responding to the positive atmosphere he constantly exuded. Howie Dunn was an immensely likeable guy.

  “I do believe you.” Sam popped the piece of bagel into her mouth, chewed and washed the bite down with her latte. “So you never have said what you think.” As soon as she had the words out of her mouth, she regretted having asked the question. It put both of them on the spot.

  “About whether or not you cut a deal with the Cipher?”

  Sam hesitated, but now that she’d invested this much, she couldn’t not ask the real question. “Do you think I’m a traitor?”

  Howie was quiet for a short time. He studied her. “Answering that question either way might compromise my presence here,” he said. “I hope you understand.”

  Sam nodded. “I do.” Understanding dawned in her. If he said he didn’t believe she was a traitor, Mitchell might pull him so that sympathy wouldn’t result. If he said he believed she was a traitor, maybe the working relationship they had found wouldn’t come so natural.

  “I can’t do my job properly if I start looking at that,” Howie said. “I have to remain outside your problem and work on the one I’ve been given.”

  “I know. I appreciate that.” The bite of bagel was almost tasteless in Sam’s mouth. Under other circumstances, she didn’t know if she’d be able to remain as neutral as Howie was. She tried to make light of the situation. “I suppose Riley McLane is the only one still holding out for my innocence. At least, where the Cipher is concerned.”

  “He does do that.”

  “I haven’t seen him lately.” Actually, she hadn’t seen Riley in four days. Not since her awkward attempt to seduce him. She hated remembering how she’d practically thrown herself at him. But sometimes, in the night, she half dreamed and half fantasized about that encounter, and sometimes—when she felt she could safely deny control over her thoughts—things progressed much further than they had in real life.

  Unfortunately, dreams like that provided a lot of discomfort later. On mornings after those dreams she’d felt the pangs of loneliness close around her like the steel jaws of a bear trap.

  “Riley’s not here,” Howie said as he opened files they’d earmarked the previous day.

  That surprised Sam and yet it didn’t. She had noticed Riley’s absence and wondered how he’d been able to stay away so long. Not that she believed he was so attracted to her, but he would have come by to put more pressure on her. Riley McLane wasn’t the kind of man to leave a situation alone.

  “Riley’s not here at the Agency,” Sam repeated. “Today?”

  “For the past four days.”

  “What happened?”

  “Director Mitchell gave Riley some time off.”

  “Because of me?” Although Howie hadn’t brought it up, Sam felt certain the agent knew about her attempted seduction. She felt embarrassed and vulnerable, and she hurried on. “What happened four days ago wasn’t Riley’s fault. He was a…an innocent bystander. I was just trying to get him to…”

  “Sam,” Howie interrupted gently. “Sam.”

  She quieted and looked at him.

  “Riley took some time off for medical reasons.”

  “Oh.” Sam felt her face burn. She hated that. As fair complexioned as she was, her face always showed red. “Is he all right?”

  “Medical cleared him. He chose to take time off.”

  “Why?”

  “He said his shoulder was still bothering him.”

  That didn’t make any sense. Riley had been chafing to get back into the field.

  Or maybe what I did got back to whoever left the lipstick on Riley’s shirt collar. If she’s in the business, and she probably is, then she probably heard about it. Maybe he’s off trying to save that relationship. Sam felt as if she’d been punched in the stomach. Guilt over possibly interfering with a personal relationship assailed her. The image of Riley in the arms of other woman, someone dark and sultry and exotic, filled her mind.

  “You okay?” Howie asked.

  “Sure,” she replied. “Why?”

  “You look like you ate something that disagreed with you.”

  “Just tired. I haven’t been sleeping well.”

  “Yeah.” Howie tapped the keyboard. A pleasant ding sounded. “I’ve got some pictures I want you to see.”

  Capturing her latte, Sam walked over to stand behind Howie. She peered at the notebook computer’s monitor over his shoulder.

  A series of picture icons popped up on the screen with metallic pings. Howie put the cursor over one of them and double-clicked to open the .bmp file.

  The picture opened, filling the screen and revealing a man’s image. The man was obviously Middle Eastern, judging from the hooded eyes and large nose, but his complexion was more buttery than coffee. His beard was short, a ruffle of tight curls.

  “Know him?” Howie asked.

  Sam studied the face, wondering if the image was a trap of some sort. “No. Who is he?”

  “A guy named Faisal Hamid. Supposed to be linked to the new arms trade that’s shaping up in Berzhaan.” Howie tapped keys. “Faisal is making the rounds throughout Suwan, trying to set up business with the Kemenis and the Q’Rajn.”

  “Those people don’t deal with the same suppliers,” Sam said. She knew that from the background reports she’d read.

  “Only if the suppliers have political aspirations,” Howie corrected. “Faisal, here, is totally apolitical. A dollar is a yen is a deutsch mark to him. Guy’s totally about the bottom line.” He paused. “You sure you don’t know him?”

  “No.”

  “That’s strange,” Howie said, “because he was one of the guys who got identified at the shootout when MI-6 filmed you in action.”

  Sam went very still, thinking quickly.

  Howie looked up at her expectantly.

  “The Cipher is very cautious about the work he’s doing there,” Sam said. “Most of us didn’t know the others.”

  “So what capacity did you serve in?”

  “Just support.”

  “Interesting.” Howie turned back to the screen.

  “What do you mean?”

  “According to the new Intel we’ve gotten, a woman was arranging for the Russian weapons that were being delivered that day.”

  My mysterious double is the ringleader of the arms suppliers? Sam couldn’t believe it. “There was more than one woman in the group.”

  “In a Middle Eastern theater?” Howie raised a skeptical eyebrow. “That’s a chancy play.”

  “Berzhaan’s not the typical Middle-Eastern country these days,” Sam pointed out. She’d seen the country and knew that what she was saying was true. Suwan was becoming something of a crossroads of Eastern and Western business and tourist travel. “I worked undercover there for the Agency a couple times.”

  “Not in a high-visibility capacity.”

  “Selling black-market arms to a country’s guerrillas and terrorists isn’t exactly a high-visibility occupation.” Sam remembered the digital sequence she’d seen. “I wasn’t supposed to be seen at all. I was just in a support capacity.”

  “All right.” Howie clicked more buttons, shifting through the pictures. He asked her about several other people sitting at tables in open-air restaurants or going into and out of homes and businesses.

  Sam didn’t know any of them. “Who are these guys?”

  Howie stopped on the picture of a tall man leaning against an alley wall. The man wore khaki pants and a white shirt rolled to midforearm. His hair was black, shot through with gray, and he wore a long mustache that nearly reached his jawline.

  “Sergei Ivanovitch,” Howie replied. “He’s a colonel in the SVR.”

  That made Sam curious. The SVR was the Russian equivalent of the CIA, an espionage agency that operated outside the country to collect information on potenti
al international threats.

  “Russia’s very interested in Berzhaan’s political future,” Howie said. “Whichever way the political leanings and sympathies of the government in charge of the country goes, so goes the untapped oil reserves Berzhaan is sitting on.”

  The oil reserves promised to make a huge impact in the Middle East as well as the Western world and Russia. China was starting to make inroads into Middle-Eastern oil to answer that country’s own growing energy needs. Unfortunately, with the oil reserves nearing capacity production, China’s interest threatened the Western interests as well as Russia’s.

  “I don’t recall Ivanovitch on the debrief,” Sam said.

  “He’s not,” Howie said. “He’s a new addition to the Berzhaan scene.”

  “How new?”

  “We’re not certain. An…operative in Berzhaan just spotted Ivanovitch there.”

  Sam noticed Howie’s hesitation but didn’t say anything. It bothered her that Howie might not want to trust her with sensitive information. But she understood completely; she was quite certain under similar circumstances that she wouldn’t have trusted her, either.

  “Ivanovitch keeps a low profile.” Howie pressed more keys.

  The pictures on the computer monitor flickered. There were two more pictures of Ivanovitch lighting a cigarette and smoking it, then the man was gone.

  “Did Ivanovitch make our agent?” Sam asked. Too late, she realized that she’d referred to the agent as our. There was nothing our about the operation.

  “We don’t know,” Howie said.

  “Did the agent get a feeling?”

  “The agent didn’t say.”

  “You’re still in touch with him?”

  “With the agent? Yes.”

  “What is Ivanovitch doing there?”

  “We haven’t ascertained. In the past, the SVR have actively sought an American government link to the weapons the Kemenis are being supplied with. They still contend that the CIA is supplying those weapons.”

  “Are we?” Sam asked.

  “No.”

  Even though Howie sounded certain and probably believed it, Sam knew the possibility still existed. “When did these pictures come in?”

  “This morning.”

  “Why did Mitchell decide to show them to me?”

  “Because he wants results.” Howie sipped his latte. “Director Mitchell also felt there might be a Russian connection.”

  “Why?”

  “Because the first language you spoke as a child was Russian.” There was no accusation in Howie’s look.

  Sam let out a slow breath. “Understood. But you need to know that I don’t remember anything about that. I had to learn Russian again later in school.” But learning that language had come more easily than any of the other languages she spoke. The spoken language was there almost instantly, but the written portion of the language had come with difficulty.

  “Who are these other people?” Sam asked, watching the pictures as Howie flicked through them as steady as a metronome.

  “Our agent has identified them as part of a group of weapons dealers who have been in Berzhaan for the last few months. Do you recognize any of them?”

  “No,” Sam answered. She grew agitated. The lie she’d told about being involved with the Cipher wouldn’t hold up under stiff scrutiny for long. She didn’t know enough to make the story stick. She was beginning to think Mitchell suspected that, though she was certain he wouldn’t let her go, either. If anything, with the video proof he had of her guilt, the director would say she was bluffing to buy time for herself or her partners. “Let’s get back to the Cipher.” Despite her own predicament, she still wanted to protect the Cassandras if she could.

  “Sure.” Howie tapped the computer keyboard again and brought up the master file they’d created on the assassin. “Looks like we were right about the yacht crash along the Turkish coastline two months ago.”

  “The Cipher?”

  Howie brought up the news stories they’d ferreted out at Sam’s insistence. During his career, the Cipher had become a shadow, never leaving behind anything that would identify him. Ultimately, though, the leads to the Cipher came from the people who hired him.

  Despite a clean murder scene and an “accidental” death, the people who had contracted the Cipher had sometimes still fallen prey to law enforcement agencies and insurance investigators. They’d talked of the mysterious assassin-for-hire who promised a death no one would investigate.

  If the Cipher had only killed people without wealth or corporate stock or political influence, his crimes might never have been discovered. But killing those people didn’t pay.

  “I accessed the police and maritime reports concerning the crash,” Howie said.

  The newspapers and television media had published the yacht’s sudden veering out of control as the result of the boat pilot’s inebriated state at the time of the collision. The yacht had rammed two fishing vessels, resulting in four deaths besides the owner’s. All three vessels had gone down.

  The owner had been a fifty-year-old man newly promoted to CEO of his father’s oil concerns under development in Berzhaan. Six months previously, the man had inherited his father’s controlling interest in the corporation. Upon his death, the controlling interest was disseminated among his four sons, splitting the vote and leaving the corporation open to a hostile takeover that had just happened.

  That takeover had alerted Sam to the possibility that the Cipher might have had a hand in the man’s death. Usually, the assassin’s targets had been men whose removal would trigger events favorable to governments, world leaders, political groups or financial empires. The man did not work cheaply.

  But if that was the case, why would the Cipher murder Rainy? What was there at the Athena Academy that would interest the assassin or his employer?

  She thought about the egg-mining operation that Rainy might have been subjected to while under the care of the Athena Academy staff. If she assumed Rainy had uncovered the theft of her eggs and was pursuing the truth when she was murdered, the hardest part of the whole scenario was realizing that someone from the academy might have hired the Cipher to kill Rainy.

  Sam was convinced someone had. The MO fit too tightly, and the stakes were evidently high.

  “Going over those reports last night after I left you,” Howie said, “I found details that had been omitted from the international news.” He tapped keys, and documents showed up on the monitor.

  “What am I looking at?” Sam asked.

  “Eyewitness accounts. One’s in Farsi and the other is in Italian. I know you read Italian.” Howie tapped the keys again. “I thought you might pay close attention to this section.”

  A highlighted segment of text appeared on the monitor.

  Sam read the handful of sentences quickly. “This person—”

  “One of the sexual entertainers hired to accompany the yacht,” Howie said.

  “—mentions that the pilot apparently had some kind of seizure just before the boat went out of control,” Sam said.

  “I know.” Howie tapped the keys again. Both sections, one in Italian and one in Farsi, shimmered and became sentences in English.

  Sam read through both sections. “The second statement confirms the first. The victim went down only seconds before the yacht slammed into the fishing trawlers.”

  “Right. Sounds like the Cipher’s MO, doesn’t it?”

  Sam nodded. “Was the boat owner autopsied?”

  “Yes. So were the other bodies. All of them were posted because they died a questionable death unattended.”

  “And?”

  Howie shook his head. “The tox screens came back negative. The guy had been drinking, but not enough to cause him to pass out.”

  “Was there any other physical evidence that might have caused the fainting spell?”

  “No, but there is this.” Howie tapped keys again, and a new picture filled the screen.

  The photograph on th
e monitor was clear, obviously taken by a professional. It showed a harbor rescue team pulling a body from the water onto a boat.

  “This was shot by a travel reporter from a helicopter,” Howie said. “She lucked onto the shot and it was used in a chain of newspapers. I found out about it and got a copy.”

  “We’ve seen this picture,” Sam said. She remembered the picture from several newspapers and magazines they’d gone through.

  “Yeah,” Howie agreed. “But we never saw a copy of the original. The guy’s death wasn’t earth-shattering, so we only saw the reduced version. Watch what happens when I blow it up.” He tapped keys again.

  Sam watched silently as the image multiplied several times. The view focused on the dead man’s left ankle. A shadow took shape there.

  “Know what it could be?” Howie asked softly.

  Studying the shadow wrapped around the dead man’s ankle, Sam recognized the image with a start. “Fingers.”

  “Yeah. Those are bruises. Evidently somebody grabbed hold of this guy’s ankle and held him under till he drowned. He must not have been completely out when he went into the water.”

  “The Cipher was there,” Sam whispered, understanding at once.

  “Right,” Howie said. “He got to the pilot somehow, with some fast-acting agent, knocked the guy out, then managed to survive the wreck and made sure of the kill he’d been hired for.”

  “We’d assumed he didn’t like to be there for the kill,” Sam said.

  “Everybody did,” Howie agreed. “Obviously the guy doesn’t take a lot of chances when he’s working a contract, but when it comes down to it, he’s not afraid of going head to head with a situation.” He paused. “That makes this guy a lot more dangerous than anybody had ever thought.”

  “I know,” Sam said, feeling excitement grow inside her, “but it also means that the Cipher was part of the group on the yacht. We’ve got copies of the film and pictures that were shot aboard the boat prior to the wreck, right?”

  Howie nodded.

  “Break it out. If we got this lucky, we might be able to identify him.”

  Riley McLane felt naked without a weapon. But getting a weapon in Berzhaan was impossible to do without drawing too much attention to himself. On guard against the Q’Rajn and the Kemeni guerrillas, the national military teams policing Suwan seemed to be everywhere. If he’d had enough cash, he could have bought a pistol from a black-market dealer. But bringing a lot of cash out of the United States and into Berzhaan was a problem, as well.