As expected, the rental unit had been converted from a living space to one dedicated to Gant’s old craft. On this alone the man could be sent back to Federal prison, so he’d either been very careful, or protected from on high. Neither mattered to her right then. Only determining if anything in the space could help them in surveilling their suddenly nervous target was of consequence.
Within a few moments it became clear that, if anything, the situation regarding Kirby Gant had changed. Dramatically.
“Watch One,” Bella Jeffs spoke quietly into the mic. “He wiped everything.”
“Say again, Watch One.”
She stepped toward the array of computers and monitors, all dark, a thin scent of an electrical burn in the air. Her eyes focused on the very apparent box which had been positioned atop a keyboard, wires snaking from it, a single toggle switch on its upper face pressed forward.
“He had some sort of failsafe,” Bella reported. “Everything is fried.”
She was no technical master, but she understood the basics of computers and their components. One could bash them into a thousand pieces to destroy what was within, shattering sensitive memory and storage modules, reducing hard drives to bits of useless metal.
Or you could obliterate the same with an overload of electricity. Zap everything into a digital oblivion.
“You’re sure?” the handler asked.
“I am,” Bella confirmed.
What was unasked, and unspoken, in their exchange, though, was the underlying meaning in what they’d seen Gant do, and what she’d discovered in his hideaway.
He’s not coming back…
This Bella Jeffs knew. The handler would have come to the same conclusion as well, she expected. What that would mean to those calling the shots on this operation she could only imagine, and none of it could even remotely be considered a good thing.
* * *
They heard it before they saw it, approaching too early and from the wrong direction.
“Red One,” the spotter said into his radio. “We’ve got company.”
He raised his night vision binoculars and zeroed in on the source of the all too familiar sound, finding the lone helicopter approaching from the north. The one he’d expected would be coming from the south, practically over his head. But that aircraft was still ten minutes out. The first shot from the rifleman lying prone at his side would not be fired until a minute before that event, to be followed by two more shots intended to take out a total of three sentries on the west and south of the facility’s exterior.
This, though, might be the unexpected wrench tossed into the works to put everything on hold.
“Helicopter landing west of the target,” the spotter reported.
“Stand by,” the Blue Team Leader responded from his place aboard the inbound chopper. “Control, what’s your call?”
* * *
Control…
That was him, Andrew Wyland knew. The anonymous shot caller watching and listening to the carefully crafted snatch operation about to be bolloxed up. Tactical decisions were up to the Blue Team Leader, but this was not such a call. What they were witnessing in person, and he was seeing via video link from cameras integrated in the sniper team’s optics, was a matter of strategy—a ‘go or no go’ call. With one word from him, the inbound chopper bearing the assault element would turn back, and the sniper teams would creep away. Just by uttering ‘abort’ over the communications link that stretched to his location in London, he could call off the operation.
But could he truly afford to do that? And was it even necessary?
He wondered these things as he studied the unfolding scene of the unmarked Blackhawk helicopter settling to the earth fifty yards from the building where Simon Lynch was housed, dust billowing briefly before its rotors began to slow. Two armed guards jogged from the entrance to the facility and approached the helicopter as the right-side door slid open.
“Control, we need a call.”
“Stand by,” Wyland told the Blue Team Leader as he leaned closer to the monitor, watching as a figure in a hood was helped from the Blackhawk. It was a woman, he thought by the shape and stature. Her hands were unbound. She was not a prisoner. A guest, he thought, who’d arrived under a security protocol.
It can’t be…
But it had to be, Wyland told himself. Who else would it be but the new liaison? Yet, if it was her, the woman who’d unwittingly led them to their target, why was she arriving in the dark hours of the morning? This could not be standard procedure. Something most definitely was…different. He didn’t want to brand her arrival as a harbinger of something ‘wrong’.
The guards hustled the hooded woman quickly from the helicopter, its rotors slowing more, but not stopping. The pilots within weren’t shutting down the Blackhawk’s engine.
They’re waiting for her…
If Wyland was right, the woman who had to be the liaison might be gone again in a few minutes. But could the team he’d sent in wait for that uncertain moment?
“Control…”
Wyland watched as she was led quickly past a pair of sentries and into the building. She was inside, with the others. With Simon Lynch. All it would take was an extra bullet to deal with her. And his people had plenty to spare.
“Can you deal with the helicopter?” Wyland asked.
“Affirmative,” the Blue Team Leader replied with quick confidence.
Something had changed, Wyland knew, but not enough to halt the operation. Not enough to postpone their best, and possibly only, chance to acquire the prize his employer, his master, had set his sights on.
“Continue,” Wyland said into the headset microphone.
“Copy,” the Blue Team Leader said.
Wyland sat back in his chair. The helicopter was just minutes away from reaching the remote facility. The sniper teams would soon engage their targets. It was about to begin.
“I’m a killer,” Andrew Wyland said softly, smiling at that realization. But only for a moment as the full weight of that now irreversible fact weighed on him. “A god damn killer.”
* * *
There was no gentle, appeasing welcome this time. General Karen Vance whipped the hood from Emily’s head and tossed it onto the nearby conference table.
“I was hoping you were not going to be a problem,” Vance said.
Emily glanced around the space, the same room in which she’d met the general the first time. And another.
“Where is your sidekick?”
Vance considered the plucky agent past her slightly upturned nose. “Dr. Michaels is in his quarters. Sleeping. Just as Simon is.”
“Fine,” Emily said. “Let’s let the good doctor sleep and you and I can go wake Simon.”
“Agent LaGrange,” Vance said, her head shaking slightly. “You don’t dictate access to him.”
“Right now I do,” Emily said. “Someone buried that memo that Agent Jefferson sent to the Bureau. Any idea who that might be?” Vance did not respond to Emily’s challenge, though both women knew the answer, and both the danger and promise that knowledge held. “Jefferson didn’t make a stink about you trying to shut him up, General Vance. I’m not going to be so charitable. I’ll add my voice to his and cause such a shitstorm in the Bureau, in Congress, in the press, that your Ranch here will be lucky if it’s the only thing bulldozed. Careers will be obliterated, yours included.”
Vance eyed the rogue agent for a moment, searching for some avenue of action she could pursue to mitigate her threats. A threat in return was one possible approach.
“Violations of national security statutes such as those you are suggesting will result in your incarceration, Agent LaGrange. Not mine. You’ll be fortunate if the Justice Department allows you a cell with a view of the sky. Imagine that as your future for the next twenty, thirty, forty years.”
Emily had expected nothing less from the authoritarian in the retired Air Force officer. Her response was to smile.
“That outcome am
uses you, Agent LaGrange?”
“No,” Emily said. “The shallowness of your thinking does.”
Vance absorbed the insult, but didn’t take the bait.
“Shutting me up silences one voice,” Emily said, her head now shaking at the woman facing her. “Do you seriously think I’d make this move without ensuring that Simon’s story gets out even without me?”
In that instant, Vance understood that her problem had at least doubled in scope.
“You told someone,” Vance said.
“At least,” Emily said, allowing a bit of uncertainty to remain. It didn’t matter that Kirby Gant was the only soul who knew what she was doing, if he didn’t hear from her in a short period of time, the arrangement they made would have him release everything both he and she knew about Simon Lynch, and Art’s improbable suicide, and then go completely off grid to save himself for as long as possible.
“If you’re not just being boastful,” Vance challenged what Emily was implying.
“General Vance, I’m standing here. In the middle of the night. Talking to you. I made that happen. And I’m ready to make much worse happen if we don’t come to some understanding about Simon Lynch.”
Vance considered what she was being presented with. It was a threat and an offer all in one. But the other end of that offer was still nebulous. Just what the hell Special Agent Emily LaGrange wanted out of this forced meeting was an unknown.
For now.
“Fine,” Vance said. “We’ll go see Simon. And then we’ll come to this understanding you envision.”
* * *
He’d thrown up twice in the last twenty minutes. At least it was in the toilet of his bathroom at home, Ezekiel Sanders thought. The number of times he’d lost his lunch, or dinner, in airport or hotel or fast food restrooms since shortly before his diagnosis was not an inconsiderable number. It was just oddly comforting to be nauseous in familiar surroundings as the day was about to begin.
As he stood from where he’d knelt at the toilet and flushed, though, his relief was washed away with the sound of a text message. He left the bathroom and checked his phone on the night stand. A simple message awaited him: !
The exclamation point on the screen was just below a series of numbers which identified the sender, the same as the spoofed information had told him that Lane had contacted him from outside his Minneapolis hotel. This number at the end of the string of zeroes was a 3.
Harrison…
Sanders put his cell aside and went to his closet, the walk-in space more suited to a married man than a lifelong bachelor. The last relationship he’d had ended over a year ago, the woman, a fine human being he’d met through friends, unable to exist within the push and pull of his multiple lives.
For nearly thirty years he’d served his country in various capacities at the Federal Communications Commission, rising to a position where he was both useful and respected. The compensation was adequate, but the true value of his position was freedom. His work kept him in the field nine days out of ten. There were no supervisors looking over his shoulder. No coworkers to wonder where he was when his office was empty. He was the FCC’s equivalent of a traveling inspector, verifying the condition of the nation’s communications infrastructure from Alaska to Puerto Rico. If he felt it necessary to inspect a fiber optic node in Walla Walla, Washington, he booked a flight, a room, a car, and did so.
Often, though, such trips were merely cover for the other half of his life. The covert realm into which he’d been recruited by Mr. Pritchard. That man, his mentor, had arranged the position he still held, allowing frequent absences so that he might serve the group. And the greater good.
Doing so, though, required care, even in the freedom he enjoyed in his position. And it was that very position which also allowed him to exercise such care with knowledge few possessed. Knowledge which provided him both the tools and the timing to navigate channels of secure communications. Doing so in the world, as connected and surveilled as it was, was no simple task.
Sanders opened the closet door and stopped just short of entering. Instead he gripped the jamb opposite the hinge side of the opening and rotated it toward him, revealing a space behind it. He reached in and retrieved a small phone that looked like none on the market, just numbers on its face and no screen set into the simple plastic housing. He pressed a series of numbers and brought the phone to his ear, knowing that, on the opposite end of the call, the former Army colonel would be doing the same thing with a nearly identical phone in a few seconds.
“You have some news?” Sanders said when the ringing stopped.
“Our friend bolted,” Harrison said.
Sanders took a moment to process the information, cryptic as it was. Despite the precautions built into the bootleg phone system, with calls being routed along mismatched carriers to handsets that didn’t officially exist, there was always the chance that someone could be listening. The slight but precise alteration to each of their voices, done automatically by scrambling software built into the handsets, would make any voiceprint almost impossible, but Ezekiel Sanders knew none of them were fully comfortable with ‘almost’ as a security protocol.
“And he’s going…”
“We don’t know,” Harrison told the group’s leader. “He made it clear he didn’t want company.”
Shit…
Kirby Gant had gone on the run, and those tasked with keeping him under surveillance had been unable to maintain their watch over him. Sanders was certain there was a full accounting of the situation that Harrison could offer, but he was also quite sure that none of it mattered. Not now. Because if the old hacker had made his move, that meant that another might be as well.
Emily, what are you doing…
“Not much we can do if he wants to leave,” Sanders said, his observation a subtle instruction that Harrison would understand—she wasn’t to pursue Gant any further. Doing so could easily put the people she was using at risk. “We might still need help, though.”
“Of course,” Harrison acknowledged. The translation was simple—keep your people ready for what might come next.
Whatever the hell that was, Sanders thought as he ended the call. He walked to the restroom and lay the phone in the sink. A twist of the faucet put a stream of cold water onto the device, which the Central Intelligence Agency had spent a hundred million dollars developing a few years back, only to abandon the project. But not before hundreds of prototype phones were built, a stockpile the FCC was tasked with destroying. On paper, not a single one still existed. In reality…
Sanders watched as the synthetic material that felt exactly like plastic began to dissolve, streaks of grey liquid swirling against the white of the porcelain sink bowl. Then the insides of the device liquified, bit by bit, circuit boards melting away in a bubbling, tawny puddle that cascaded down the drain. All that remained were small bits of metal and wiring and solder, which a blast from the faucet sent tumbling down the drain with the last dollops of goo that had, a minute before, been a functioning cell phone. In an hour it would be processed by some sewage treatment plant before being discharged into the Atlantic Ocean.
He left the bathroom and walked to his bedroom window, looking out over the white landscape behind his modest house. But in truth he was looking beyond that swath of wintry lawn. The sun had yet to rise in the west where Emily LaGrange had traveled the previous night. Idaho Falls had been her destination, but Sanders had a strong suspicion in his gut that she was no longer there, and a stronger suspicion where she ultimately wanted to be.
“She couldn’t get there,” Sanders said aloud, looking west toward the brightening sky. “She couldn’t.”
After a moment’s consideration of all that had happened in the previous ten hours, he began to fear that his statement was more wish than certainty.
Twenty Four
I’ll take his weapon…
That was the decision Emily LaGrange made as the guard let her and General Vance through the last door
which separated the rest of the facility from where Simon Lynch lived. The man was taller than her, and heavier, but the short HK assault rifle slung across his chest was easily accessible. A simple clip held it to the sling which crossed over his right shoulder. With a strong pull it would separate from its webbing and she would have control of the rifle before he could draw his sidearm. That was how she would do it—just the way Art Jefferson had planned.
“You actually want me to wake him?” Vance asked Emily as the door closed behind and they moved down a hallway, past several rooms with closed doors.
Sleeping quarters, Emily thought. Jefferson had never made it this deep into the facility to share such information with Kirby Gant, but it made sense that those who were most closely responsible for Simon Lynch would bed down close by. Leah Poole had said as much, stating that she’d spent days, even weeks at a time on station with their prize.
“I do,” Emily told the general.
Vance led them further along the hallway until it opened up, a wider corridor here, space to the right where a woman about Emily’s age sat at a bank of monitors, all dark but one. On that display she could just make out a shape on a bed, the dim scene enhanced under infrared lighting.
“Ms. Lamb…”
Audra Lamb looked up from a paper log book beneath the monitors, surprised by the general’s voice. And by the presence of the woman next to her. She stood slowly.
“General Vance,” Audra said, her gaze shifting between her superior and Emily.
“We’re going to need to wake Simon,” Vance told her.
Audra processed the directive for a moment and reached for the phone. “I’ll let Dr. Michaels know.”
Vance stepped forward and waved off that idea. “We’ll let him sleep.”
Simon Sees (An Art Jefferson Thriller Book 5) Page 22
