“Aw man, I was afraid you’d be here,” said Cade.
“Well kiss my ass. Who was it that was there to take care of you after you hurled at that homecoming party?” Kyle jabbed, grinning.
“Yeah, yeah. I know you’d do anything for me. You’d bail me out of jail, you’d kill for me, all that fraternity crap, blah, blah, blah,” said Cade.
Cade walked into the kitchen and put down his laptop bag, still not seeing Jana sitting across the room.
“I don’t have anything new yet. They’re watching me like a hawk. My computer is being monitored. I can see the network sniffer on it. If I download any data, they’d know.”
“Oh really? Can’t get the data, huh? Well what if I told you I could get you a date with Jana? I bet you’d suddenly find a way to get the data then, wouldn’t you?” Kyle ribbed, never letting on that Jana was sitting right there. “Admit it, you love her, don’t you? Come on, admit it.”
“How do you . . . aw man, don’t tell her, all right? I mean, shit, a girl like that? I’d never get a date with her. She’s way out of my league. Look, don’t tell her. And I’m not in love with her. I’m just . . . obsessed. You happy now?”
Kyle’s attempt to hold his laughter broke. “Okay, I won’t say a word. Honest.” Laughter burst out of both Kyle and Jana. Cade poked his head around the wall and saw Jana sitting there, gripping her mouth with both hands to stifle herself.
Cade had to laugh at himself. There was nothing left to do; it was too late—he’d already made a fool of himself. “Okay, okay, now I feel like an ass. Are you both happy?” Laughter erupted in the small apartment.
“Cade, all right, all right. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to laugh,” said Jana. “Let’s put the whole thing behind us, okay? But listen, in all seriousness, we need to talk. We brought food. We’ll talk while we eat. We’ve got a lot to do tonight.”
Cade’s face was still flushed. “We do?” He looked at the two of them. “What do we have to do tonight?” Cade held both hands up as if to surrender. “Wait, wait, don’t tell me. Good God, whatever it is, I don’t think I want to know.”
Kyle and Jana laughed at him, hoping to ease the tension as Cade turned back towards Kyle.
“Cool Mac, okay, there’s something that’s been eating at me. It’s something I didn’t notice at first, and now I can’t stop thinking about it. The other night . . . that night I saw you on TV at the news conference. I called your cell, and you were on the scene of the Montana bombing, right?”
“Yeah?” said Kyle.
“I don’t understand. The bombing happened, what, like an hour beforehand?”
“And?”
“Dude. You live in San Diego. How is it that you were on the scene of a bombing that’s fifteen hundred miles away in less than an hour? And thinking about it, you must have been there much sooner, because your boss knew all the details of what happened, right?”
Kyle paused. “Shit, I knew this would come up . . . I tell you what, let’s take a breather. Let’s eat first, then we’ll talk.”
Jana and Kyle didn’t say anything work related until after all the reheated pizza was cleared from the coffee table. They wanted Cade to relax and decompress. What they were about to tell him was going to wig him out. And if the truth be told, both Kyle and Jana were a bit wigged out themselves.
Jana began, “Cade, what we’re going to tell you is going to be a shock.”
Cade looked at her. She was the sultriest thing he’d ever seen. Whatever she had to tell him, he was going to listen because listening meant he got to look at her without her thinking he was gawking, which he was.
“There’s no easy way to say this, so I’m just going to say it. You work at spook central.”
Cade smiled, glancing back and forth at the two of them. “What? What do you mean? What, like Ghostbusters or something? There are ghosts in my office?”
Jana looked to Kyle. “No. Not those kinds of spooks.”
Cade’s eyes squinted in confusion.
“Spooks. Wait, you mean spies? Those kind of spooks? What are you talking about?” But before Jana could respond, realization took hold of Cade. Spies. They’re spies. That’s what all the secrecy is about. That’s what the DEFCON 4 fire drills are about. That’s what Rupert Johnston meant when he talked about the seventeenth floor having a special coating on the glass to thwart laser mics from being able to eavesdrop.
“I, I, I . . . they’re spies? Like, real spies?!” Cade was beginning to panic.
“Calm down,” said Jana, sitting on the couch next to him. “But yes, we mean spies . . . Cade, your coworkers are employed by the CIA.”
Cade broke free from the trance of Jana’s deep blue eyes and stood up, knocking hard into the glass top of the coffee table. It slid down to the carpeted floor with a thud.
“Whaaat in the blue FUCK are you talking about?! How could they be CIA?! There’s just . . . there’s no way . . .”
Kyle jumped up and put his hands on Cade’s shoulders. “Look at me. Look at me! There’s nothing we can do about it, Cade. It is what it is. You remember that time in the frat when that dumbass Matt Lumson threw that beer bottle way up in the air? And it landed on Dr. Lick’s car? The president of the damn university? We were screwed, right? The whole frat was put on probation, and we just had to suck on it. It was what it was. There was no way out. It’s like that, man. It is what it is. And now, we have to deal with it. Now, we make our move.”
Jana interrupted. “Kyle. Hold on. Don’t go there yet. Before we tell him our plans, he has to know why. He has to know what’s at stake.”
Jana had a structured way of thinking. A way of compartmentalizing and speed-thinking three sentences ahead of whomever she was talking to.
“What do you mean? What’s at stake?” said Cade.
Kyle exhaled. “Sit down, man. Let’s talk about this thing.”
Cade’s eyes locked on Kyle as he found his seat on the couch again, his left arm feeling behind him like a blind man. He collapsed into the couch, terrified of what they might say next.
Kyle laid out their theory. Thoughtstorm was the nerve center of a communications system for a CIA-sponsored terror cell that was spread out across the United States. After it was over, Cade looked like he was going to be sick.
“You think Thoughtstorm is run by the CIA? You think the CIA is funding terrorists? Funding terrorists so that they can work their way higher and higher up within the terrorist organization until they can bust the whole thing wide open? Are you out of your fucking minds?”
Kyle and Jana said nothing.
Cade’s breathing became erratic. “But in the process, people and kids and moms and shit are dying? Are you kidding me?”
Jana put her hand onto Cade’s shoulder and slid closer to him. “Okay, okay. Let’s lean back. Breathe, Cade, breathe. Relax. Long breaths, in and out. That’s better. It’s a lot to take in, I know. But we’re pretty damn sure we’re right. We lifted a fingerprint from the one you call William Macy.” Agent Baker paused, looking up at Kyle. She knew that by revealing these things she may be breaching national security. But too much was riding on Cade Williams. The clock was ticking, and people were going to die, again.
“I’m not supposed to tell you things like this, Cade,” said Jana. “I could get into trouble. A lot of trouble. But my father drilled one thing into my head that I carry with me every day. He told me to never ever do anything I’m going to regret for the rest of my life.”
Cade looked at her, stunned. He’d heard the exact same phrase from his dad so many times growing up he’d wanted to puke. But now he was starting to understand what his father meant.
“I might get in trouble now, but I’d never be able to live with myself if there was some way for me to stop these assholes from killing again,” she said. “And frankly, I couldn’t give a fuck. I’m not going to sit here and watch it happen. I’m going to stop it, and stop it hard.”
“So what about this fingerprint?” Cade rega
ined some of his composure, and his breathing normalized.
“William Macy’s fingerprint was found in the NCIC database. But access to the identity was blocked by something called the Fourteenth Protocol. When Director Latent saw that, I swear, he turned white as a ghost.”
Kyle spoke up, “None of us even knew what the Fourteenth Protocol was. Latent was the only one in the whole office. That’s how classified it is.”
Then Jana said, “As the stories around the office go, when Latent was a field agent, he was tougher than nails. They said he’d kick your ass if you tried to get in front of him when it was time to breach a door as a raid was about to happen. He doesn’t back down for anything. But, man, this thing scared the shit out of him.”
Cade was ready to learn more and sat up a little. “All right, so what is this protocol thing?”
“It’s apparently one of fifteen executive protocols created after 9/11. I don’t know what the rest of them mean, but the fourteenth corresponds to the CIA. It means William Macy, or whatever his real name is, is a Company man. He works for the Central Intelligence Agency.”
“That’s not all that you have to tell me, is it?”
Kyle looked at him out of the side of his eye. “No. No, it’s not.”
“All right, so what else do you have to tell me? What is it you’ve been working up to?”
Kyle walked across the room and stood with his back to Cade, staring at a span of wall where a framed picture would normally hang.
“Montana. You asked me how it was I got from San Diego to Shelby, Montana, in under an hour.” Kyle thought back to that night, to the horrible things he’d seen, sights that would haunt him for the rest of his life.
“I didn’t get from San Diego to Shelby in an hour. I was in a Gulfstream jet an hour before the bomb went off. We were flying around the center of the country, just waiting for it to happen.”
“You were just waiting for it to happen?”
“Remember, Cade, these attacks are timed,” said Kyle. “The bombing in Montana occurred eighteen days after the one in Tucson. We know when they’re going to go off, but we don’t know where.” Kyle was still staring straight ahead. “We were airborne ahead of the attack so we could respond as quickly as possible. When we got onto the scene of that bombing . . . I just . . . I can’t explain how bad it was. It was like being on the surface of the moon. Everything was gray, except for the splattering of red—everything. The dirt, the road, the buildings that were still standing; human remains were everywhere.”
Kyle turned back around to look at Cade, but Cade looked away.
“No, no. I don’t want to hear this, I can’t hear this,” said Cade.
“I have to tell you. You have to know. Otherwise, you won’t understand . . . you won’t understand what we have to do.”
Cade looked up. Jana held her hands over her mouth. She couldn’t imagine the horror of the things Kyle had seen. She now knew that this job, and the things she would see and hear, would mark her for the rest of her life.
Kyle continued, “Like I was saying, there were tiny body parts everywhere, just little fragments. There was one though, one that brought me to my knees. It was a hand. It was a tiny, tiny hand. The child must have only been about a year old. And there at my feet, I looked down. Other than the dirt, it was this perfect little hand. I just fell to my knees and lost it. I wretched like I’ve never wretched in my life. I lost it big time.”
Cade shook his head and placed his hands over his ears.
Kyle grabbed him, hard. “Cade, Cade! Goddammit! Listen to me. Listen! That little hand—it wasn’t just some piece of crime scene evidence. It was a tiny life. A real person. Some kid who never got a chance. I had to fingerprint it. I think Supervisory Special Agent Bolz wanted me to have that experience, to be emotionally tied to the investigation. When we matched the prints with the birth records at the local hospital, it led us to…” Kyle stopped and collected his thoughts. “There’s a set of grandparents who live just south of Shelby who will never see their daughter or little grandchild again. I had to tell them that the only thing we could find of their granddaughter was a . . . a . . .” He stopped, unable to finish his sentence. “Cade, we are three of the only people in the country who can stop it before it happens again. Everyone else is out there, afraid to leave their homes. People are in hiding. They’re taking away our way of life, our whole economy . . .” Kyle was walking the room, his arms flailing as he made his point. “This is not America anymore; they’ve taken that away from us. Goddammit! I need your help. We need your help.” Kyle looked despondent. “The whole damn country needs your help.”
After a long silence, Cade capitulated. “All right, Kyle, all right. Fuck it. I’ve known you forever. Whatever it is, I’m in. What is it we have to do?”
Jana looked to Kyle who had just received a call on his cell. By the look on his face, it was the call they’d been waiting for from HRT. Kyle’s thumbs-up told Jana they had the green light.
Jana said, “You’ve done everything you could to try to get us the data we need. But, it hasn’t worked. We’re going. Tonight.”
“Going where?” said Cade. “My office?” Jana looked at him with no acknowledgement. Cade’s expression went from confusion to resignation. “Oh shit, I knew you were going to say that. Son of a bitch.”
“Yes, we’re going in,” said Jana, “and we’re going to steal whatever in the hell we need to solve this. And we need you. We need you to get us in there. We’ve got to try to get in undetected. If the Company finds out, the game is up. We’ll never find out who all the members of the terror cell are.”
“The company? You mean Thoughtstorm, right?”
“No, when we say Company, we mean CIA,” said Jana. “We’ll be after several things. We need the entire list of e‑mail addresses that are a part of that campaign. We need that damn encryption code; without it, we can’t crack it, which means we are blind to what the cell members are being told. And we need to see when that e‑mail list is going to be sent another e‑mail.”
“Not that I’m arguing, but why tonight?” said Cade.
“There’ll be another bombing tomorrow morning.” Jana’s face told Cade she was as serious as a heart attack. “Yes, tomorrow morning. Like Kyle said earlier, these assholes are following a pre-timed countdown to each attack. That’s why we have to go tonight. We have less than ten hours until the next bomb goes off. We’ve got to try to at least find the location of the next attack so we can stop it. The tricky part is, even if we could stop it, we’ll have to do it in such a way as to not let the terror cell know we’ve broken their code.”
Cade thought about that for a moment. “So why can’t you go in and arrest that William Macy jackass? And Rupert Johnston for that matter, he’s got to be in on it too. And what about that Jamaican you talked about?”
“Even if we did, we don’t have enough evidence to charge them. Yeah, we’ve got our hands on some seriously incriminating-sounding conversations, but the director already talked to the US Attorney who made it clear that we don’t have jack-shit—we’d never get a conviction. Not to mention the fact that we’d still be no closer to locating the other members of the cell. We’re afraid that if we tipped our hand too early, that the cell would continue its mission.”
Kyle interrupted Jana as his call finished. “We’ve learned from experience,” said Kyle, “some of these terror cells have a final set of instructions that they are to carry out in the event it looks like the cell is compromised. No, we’ve got to be able to nail all of them at once.”
Cade could feel the pressure mounting. There would be no turning back.
Kyle continued, “And in this case, we’ve got a terror cell that’s on a countdown. Not just a countdown to tomorrow’s attack, but to a final countdown. Each attack is coming earlier and earlier than the last. They’re counting down to something. I’d hate to think that they have something bigger up their sleeve. If they get wind we’re onto them, they might j
ust execute whatever that bigger something is.”
Jana said, “Okay, Cade, what’s the move? How do we get in there and get what we need?”
Cade looked at her, shaking his head back and forth. “I knew you were going to ask me that. Damn. All right. The only way we’re going to get the data we need is to get into Rupert Johnston’s computer. And no, there’s no way to hack into it from the outside. Computer systems on the seventeenth floor are totally closed loop. They’re isolated from any outside access. We’re going to have to get his laptop in our hands, somehow.”
“It will be in his office? Will it be a password to log in?” said Jana.
“No, his uses a biometric log-in; he finger-swipes across a sensor. Basically, I’m saying we need him to log in to the laptop for us.” Cade laughed, but no one else did.
Then Kyle said, “We can do it. Really, we can do it.” He looked over at Jana. “We’ve got Johnston’s fingerprints too. We can have a gel copy of his print made and have it delivered over to us within the hour. You’ll apply it to your right index finger and swipe the laptop.”
Cade said, “Wait a minute, why are you looking at her? You don’t mean to say she’s going to log on to Johnston’s laptop do you? She can’t be on the seventeenth floor—only I can go. No one is allowed up there.”
But Kyle was confident. “Cade, security is lax during the late night.”
“How the hell do you know that?”
Kyle smirked. “We’ve got more surveillance on that place than we do on the Syrian embassy. We’ve been tracking each Thoughtstorm security employee. We know when each one comes and goes. The nighttime hours are a little more lax. And let’s not forget one other important thing. It’s only the seventeenth floor that’s crawling with Virginia farm boys . . . sorry, CIA boys. The rest of the employees are not CIA. The seventeenth floor has its own security contingent. Late at night, there will be fewer Company men on duty up there. The other security personnel you’ll see work for Thoughtstorm, not the CIA.”
The Fourteenth Protocol_A Thriller Page 16
