Athena Force 7-12

by Carla Cassidy, Evelyn Vaughn, Harper Allen, Ruth Wind, Cindy Dees

“Joseph Lockworth’s room, please,” she told the hotel operator.

  “One moment please.”

  The phone rang a couple times, and then her grandfather’s deep voice answered. “Lockworth, here.”

  He answered that as if he expected this to be a work call. But he was retired. Of course, if he was involved with S.A.F.E. he might answer that way if he expected the call to be one of his partners in crime.

  “Grandfather. It’s Diana. We need to talk. Now.”

  “Do we, indeed?” he answered. “About what?”

  Gramps was definitely in full CIA Director mode. She answered coolly, “About a man named Richard Dunst. He used to work for you. And about the Q-group. Do they work for you, too? For S.A.F.E?”

  “Well, now. We do need to talk, don’t we? I’m a little tied up at the moment. I’ll call you in a few minutes and we’ll meet. We have a lot to talk over.”

  A lump of lead formed in her stomach. He didn’t deny it. She’d been right. He was involved in S.A.F.E. Was he the one who decided Gabe Monihan shouldn’t be President? That S.A.F.E. somehow had the right to pick and choose the nation’s leader? Had he sent that hacker to her house to frame her? Then fingered her to Delphi, too. Why? Who was this S.A.F.E. group that they could turn a man against his own flesh and blood? Especially her grandfather, to whom family loyalty was so important? Did they have something on him? Some hook to blackmail him with?

  He’d delayed setting up a rendezvous with her. He needed time before he met her, eh? Why? Who was he frantically calling right now? What was he doing before they met? Arranging another kidnapping, maybe? Her murder this time?

  She glanced up at a road sign overhead listing upcoming exits. Langley, Virginia. Home of the Central Intelligence Agency. Was it also the headquarters of S.A.F.E.? Her jaw tightened. There was one sure way to find out.

  She steered her car onto the exit ramp and followed the unobtrusive signs pointing the way to CIA headquarters. She pulled up at the front guard shack. “I’m Diana Lockworth. I’m here to meet with my grandfather, Joseph Lockworth. He told me to meet him at the front reception desk.” She flashed her military ID and DIA identification for the guy.

  He put a parking pass inside her car on the dashboard and waved her through.

  One hurdle down.

  She pulled into the parking lot, which was surprisingly crowded for this time of night. But then, after the day’s double terrorist attacks, the CIA probably had every analyst on staff at work tonight trying to track down leads on the men who’d done it and who was behind them. Was there someone inside right now, equally furiously covering those very tracks?

  She parked her car and walked toward the white, modern structure, vividly aware of the cameras and guards watching her progress toward the building. She stepped into the brightly lit glass foyer, with its modern art and the eloquent wall of anonymous stars, one for each agent who’d fallen in service of his or her country. Of course, she didn’t even make it to the CIA seal on the floor before she was directed in no uncertain terms to a visitor’s reception area. Crud. She had to get into the building somehow. Fortunately, her job gave her occasional exposure to people who worked over here in the Spook House. She needed the name of someone who worked here, and who might conceivably be here, working late tonight.

  A couple names of people she’d dealt with in the last few months popped into her head. Except she hesitated to call on anyone she’d worked with on her Q-group investigation. She wouldn’t put it past her grandfather or whoever was sabotaging her research to have gotten in contact with all of her recent colleagues.

  Samantha St. John.

  The petite, Slavic beauty was one of Josie’s best friends from Athena Academy. Sam worked for the CIA as a linguist—and undoubtedly more, although they’d never spoken about that aspect of her work. Of course, Sam traveled a ton and might not be here, but it was worth a try.

  Diana stepped up to the receptionist, if the cold-eyed man sitting behind the counter could be called that. “I’m here to see Samantha St. John. Could you ring her office for me?”

  “Is she expecting you?” the man asked coolly.

  “No, she’s not. But it’s a matter of some urgency.”

  The guy gave her a condescending look that said everything that passed through this building was a matter of some urgency. Nonetheless, he typed briefly in his computer and then dialed an extension on his phone. He spoke into his wireless headset, a quiet murmur Diana couldn’t hear. Which was impressive since she was standing only a foot away from the guy.

  He looked up at her. “She’ll be right down.”

  Hallelujah. Now maybe she’d get to the bottom of what and who S.A.F.E. was and stop it once and for all.

  12:00 A.M.

  Diana spied Sam’s arrival before she could actually see her by the way people’s heads were turning at her passage. Sam was one of those women who was so strikingly beautiful that people couldn’t help but stare at her.

  “Diana! What a surprise! What brings you here at this hour of the night?”

  She smiled warmly at Sam. Ever since she’d gotten together with Riley McLane, Sam had been a different woman. Warmer. More open. It was good to see. Made a girl kind of wish she could find a guy like that for herself. Diana sighed. She had found a guy like that. There was just the small problem of him becoming President of the United States at any second.

  Diana replied, “How about we go up to your office? This is actually a business visit. I have something…sensitive…to discuss with you.”

  Sam arched one eyebrow questioningly but made no comment as she signed Diana in and got her a visitor’s badge. “This way,” she said.

  Diana followed her classmate across the giant CIA seal inlaid in the floor and down a long glass-enclosed hallway beside a courtyard. They went upstairs, past a series of unmarked doors, and through another anonymous door into a cluster of glass cubicles. Sam wound her way through the maze of people and desks to a tiny office in the back, thankfully with solid walls. She picked up a stack of files off the second chair in her office and offered it to Diana.

  Diana closed the door behind her and sat down.

  “What’s up?” Sam asked.

  Diana frowned. Now wasn’t that a good question? Aloud she answered, “I don’t know how much to tell you. If I say too much, I could put your life in danger. But, I need your help, so I owe you some sort of explanation.”

  Sam grinned. “Sounds interesting. And I can handle a little danger.”

  Diana grimaced. “This could be a lot of danger. I’ve already had my house broken into today, been arrested, been kidnapped and nearly shot twice.”

  Sam’s eyebrows zinged up and her demeanor abruptly became serious. Focused. Intense, even. Sometimes Diana forgot just how smart Sam was behind all that exotic beauty. Diana continued. “Here’s the thing. I need to break into an office in this building and search it for some information. ASAP. That’s what I need your help with.”

  Sam didn’t bat an eyelash. It confirmed Diana’s suspicion that she was a covert field operative for the CIA in addition to her overt duties as a linguist. No simple desk jockey reacted that calmly to a suggestion that she assist in a breaking-and-entering job.

  “Whose office?” Sam asked.

  “A guy named Collin Scott. Have you heard of him?”

  Sam laughed. “It’s kind of hard not to have heard of him around here. He’s the number two guy in the Plans Section. Why on earth do you want to break into his office?”

  “I have reason to believe he’s involved with a secret group called S.A.F.E.”

  Sam chuckled. “I’m sure he’s involved with a number of secret groups. That’s his job.”

  “How many of them are trying to kill Gabe Monihan?”

  That sobered up Samantha in a hurry. “You think Collin Scott’s trying to kill the next President of the United States?”

  Diana closed her eyes for a moment. Spoken aloud, it sounded absurd to her, too. “I don�
�t have time to go into the entire investigation I’ve done. But I think Scott is involved in a clandestine conspiracy of a few high-ranking government officials and civilians who want to kill Gabe.”

  “That’s preposterous,” Sam retorted.

  “So go with me to his office and see if we can find any information on this S.A.F.E. bunch.”

  Sam asked thoughtfully, “What does it stand for?”

  “Society for the Advancement of Free Economies.”

  Sam stood up. “Honey, I’d love to help you, but I just can’t. Not on this one.”

  Diana nodded in disappointed understanding. As she recalled from their martial arts training at the Athena Academy, Sam was as fast as greased lightning in a hand-to-hand fight. “I didn’t think you could help me, but it was worth a shot.” She stood up facing her old friend. “Just keep an ear to the ground, eh? If you hear anything about this S.A.F.E. group, could you give me a call? And be careful. They’re dangerous.”

  She leaned forward to hug Sam. And chopped her across the back of the head beneath the back of her skull. Hard. Enough to knock her out. She caught Sam as she sagged, unconscious, and lowered her to the floor. God, she hated having to do that.

  She taped Sam’s hands and feet behind her back using a roll of wide masking tape she found in Sam’s desk drawer. She put a couple strips of tape across her mouth, too. She taped Sam’s trussed hands and feet behind her to the legs of her desk, as well. That should keep her immobile for a few minutes. Working fast before Sam woke up, Diana tore off a strip of clear, cellophane tape from another roll of tape in Sam’s desk and pressed it hard against the pad of Sam’s thumb. She tore the tape off quickly and held it carefully, sticky side out. She grabbed Sam’s ID badge and fished in Sam’s pocket for the access card she’d used to get into this office area. Got it.

  Last, she opened up the employee directory she found in Sam’s desk and thumbed through it until she found the name, Collin Scott. She noted his office number and located it on the map inside the back cover of the book.

  She clipped Sam’s ID badge to her collar, picked up a stack of files off Sam’s desk and headed out. Here went nothing. A breaking-and-entering job inside one of the most secure buildings on the planet. If there was any doubt about her having completely lost her mind, this sealed the deal.

  She walked back through the cubicles briskly, not looking at the people working at desks inside them. Out the door and into the hall. She oriented herself quickly and headed left. Up one more floor and down another long hall. Then, around one more corner. Bingo. There was the office she was looking for. She tested the door. Locked.

  She pulled out Sam’s access card and swiped it through the magnetic lock pad. She started violently as a two-inch square pad lit up on the face of the lock and a voice intoned, “Right thumbprint, please.”

  Diana pressed the piece of tape against the pad.

  A green light flashed and the door lock clicked.

  Holy cow. It had been a total long shot to try Sam’s access code here, but Diana wasn’t about to look a gift horse in the mouth. She stepped inside, closing the hallway door behind her. A secretary’s desk dominated the center of the room. A single door stood behind it. Colin Scott’s private office. With another elaborate electronic lock beside the door. No wonder it had been so easy to get into this outer office.

  She took a look at the number pad beside this door. Similar to the one outside, except when she swiped Sam’s card this time, nobody asked for her fingerprint and the lock didn’t open. She pulled out her pocketknife and, using the screwdriver attachment, unscrewed the stainless steel cover over the guts of the electronic lock. Who’d have thought that her electrical circuitry class at the Athena Academy would ever come in so handy? She traced the circuit quickly and identified the wires that had to be crossed to open the system. Once she did that, though, she had no doubt it would trigger an alarm somewhere else in the building. She gave it two, maybe three minutes until someone would bust in here, guns blazing.

  She organized herself quickly for the break-in. Her target would be any paper records Collin Scott had in his office. They were what she’d use if she were running a conspiracy to kill the President. Electronic files were just too easy to break into. He’d probably have a filing cabinet of some kind. And it would be locked. Agency policy was that all desks were cleaned off and all papers put under lock and key every night. The infamous policy had actually cost employees here their jobs.

  She’d need a sharp, tough metal object of some kind to bust into the filing cabinet. She would never have enough time to pick the lock before security got here. She looked around the outer office. Perfect. A gold-plated shovel from some groundbreaking ceremony or other. It laid in a glass cabinet in the far corner. She snatched it out of its case and hurried back to the lock. Her other time constraint was Sam waking up and calling security. And that could happen any second.

  Ready or not, here she went. She set her watch alarm for two minutes. And went to work. It only took a couple seconds to slice through the pair of wires, strip their ends and twist them together. A touch with the tip of her knife to the right switch, a spark, and the door lock clicked open. And the clock was ticking.

  She leaped into the office, looking around for a filing cabinet. Bingo. In the corner behind the desk. She raced over to the two-drawer console. Top or bottom drawer?

  Definitely a top-drawer kind of operation.

  She smashed the shovel into the side of the cabinet. It dented and made a hell of a lot of noise, but didn’t give. Again. Paint chipped away and the dent got bigger. It took another half-dozen blows before the metal finally weakened and gave way. A tiny slit appeared in the cabinet. She slammed the shovel into it and pried the hole larger. One more big heave, and a piece of metal the width of the shovel peeled back to reveal the sides of several files stuffed with paper. Most of them were red. Probably indicated they were classified. She took the extra several seconds to widen the hole to the entire height of the drawer.

  Then, frantically, she knelt by the cabinet and started pulling out files as fast as she could. She read the tabs at the top and tossed them aside by the fistfuls. Come on, come on. It had to be in here, somewhere. Please God, let the file not be in the bottom drawer.

  The pile of papers lying all over the floor behind her grew, and the seconds ticked by. A quick glance at her watch. Thirty seconds to go. Oww! Slashing pain ripped through her left hand. She’d cut her hand at the base of her little finger on the ragged edge of the hole. No time to do anything about it. She continued yanking files out and tossing them aside.

  Twenty seconds to go.

  And then, without warning, there it was. A thick, red file marked Classified. The Initials S.A.F.E. were typed on the white label glued to the top tab. No time to look at it. She had to get out of here. She stuffed the file inside her coat and froze. A beeping sound came from the outer office. Someone was using the keypad to enter it from the hallway beyond.

  She leaped to the inner door to the office, scooping up a clock from Scott’s desk on her way past. It was embedded in a grapefruit-size marble sphere. She stuck her arm out the door and slammed the marble piece down on the door lock to the inner office. Sparks flew and sizzled as she slammed the door shut. Good Lord willing, this door failed to a locked position. She tested the knob and it wouldn’t turn. Now she could only hope the security man outside had no quick way to override the fried lock. And then, of course, she had to figure out how in the hell to get out of a third-floor office of a supersecure facility like CIA headquarters.

  Fists pounded on the door. She ignored them. Then a male voice shouted through the door. She ignored that, too. She turned on the overhead lights to better see any possible escape route, since it was no longer a secret that she was in here. No man-size ventilation shafts opened up onto this room. Just a couple small registers. The window didn’t open. She tested it with her hands. Not glass. It was no doubt made of tough, bulletproof polymers. She might c
onceivably be able to break it out of the frame, but the fall to the concrete below—or rather, the landing on it—ruled that out as an option. Bookcases lined both of the other walls of the office.

  She was so hosed.

  She was not going to get out of this one alive. But that didn’t mean she couldn’t get done what she’d come here to do before she went down in flames. She sat down at Collin Scott’s desk and pulled the S.A.F.E. file out of her coat. Working hard to ignore the heavy pounding on the door, she read as quickly as her eyes would travel across the pages.

  In the very front was a CIA analysis of a legal treatise written by one Thomas Wolfe a decade ago, predicting the rise of global terrorism and criticizing the open society America maintained. He argued with great mental agility that the only way to defeat terror was with terror. He claimed that as long as law-abiding societies were constrained by law in their fight against terrorists, they were doomed to failure. The CIA analysis found the arguments sound.

  Diana frowned. A lot had changed in the last decade. The rise of huge, powerful terror networks worldwide, 9/11 and the American overthrow of entire governments in response to terror. Huge armies of American soldiers had been thrown into the fight, along with billions upon billions of dollars of resources. Was Wolfe’s premise still valid? If she lived more than the next couple of minutes, she’d have to spend some time thinking about that one. She thumbed on to the next document.

  Transcripts of a conversation Collin Scott had at a Defense consortium with a couple of the men on her list of S.A.F.E. suspects from Oracle. They expressed concern at the direction the United States was going with terror policy or its lack thereof.

  She read on, tracing the evolution of S.A.F.E. from a loose bunch of like-minded people to a cautiously organized interest group to a conspiracy committed to action.

  The pounding at the door became even louder. Heavier. As if they were using a battering ram of some kind. The entire wall began to shake, and a picture of Collin Scott shaking hands with a giant yellow duck wearing a polyester leisure suit fell to the floor with a crash. DiscoDuck. Collin Scott had to be DiscoDuck.