by Lisa Hughey
“This won’t work,” he said glumly. “I’m immune.”
The odor of the rubbing alcohol burned my nose. My eyes watered, because of the smell, not the defeat in his voice. At least that’s what I told myself.
After the drug had time to enter his system, I handed Zeke the laptop. He very precisely aligned the edge of the laptop with the edge of the counter. Then he performed the same routine he always did before he used the laptop. He touched the top edge, the left, the right and finally the bottom of the keyboard before he powered it on.
As Zeke went through his motions, Barb input notes along the time stamp so they could analyze his responses to stimulus.
“You think that’s enough data?” I was watching the EEG machine register the spikes in his brain waves. “Should we have him surf the web?”
Zeke nodded and began typing on the laptop.
“It gives us a baseline.” Barb cautioned worriedly, “Again, this won’t hold up—”
“Doesn’t matter,” Zeke said. “I’m pretty much screwed.”
I thought about asking him a question that he normally wouldn’t answer. "What did you hack into that got you in trouble when you were sixteen?”
But he just pressed his lips together and shook his head. “Nope.”
“Come on, we need the baseline of you giving up a secret,” I cajoled.
He stared at me. I could see his brain working. Finally, he said, “Not gonna answer out loud.” However he leaned over and whispered the answer in Barb’s ear and I squirmed with a spike of jealousy. Jeez, I needed to get a grip.
The EEG continued to register the spikes and drops in his brainwaves. “Power down the laptop,” I said impulsively.
Zeke did what I asked. And we had our baseline.
Barb ended the first test. She input Zeke’s name, and the words “Under the influence of SP and Baseline for brain patterns when doing rote tasks, plus subject imparted classified information.” She saved the results to a USB drive. Then she reset the machine.
“Let’s do the second test.” I patted Zeke’s hand.
Barb said, “Okay. So after you power on the machine this time, do whatever it was that got you into trouble.”
Zeke performed the same series of touches and motions that he always did when he set up and turned on his laptop. The EEG machine registered his brain waves. There was a jagged spike first, then the lines went nearly flat.
And he just sat there. He pressed his palms flat against the top of his thighs and didn’t move.
“Zeke Hawthorne.” I said sternly, “Share your encryption program.”
Zeke opened up a new file and looked at the cursor on the blank page. He typed out a bunch of data slowly. His fingers moved slower and slower as the machine results continued to spike and dip. I couldn’t be sure without analyzing the results but it definitely looked different from the first pattern.
Finally he stopped, his fingers resting on the keys, not moving as he stared at the screen.
“What did you write?” I asked.
“I wrote out the program,” he said smugly.
I recalled our conversation from yesterday. Kerchoff’s Law. “But did you give us the key?” Because without the key the program was worthless.
Zeke stared at the screen. Saved the document. “I can’t do it.”
“But we need to see—”
“I may be accused of giving up national secrets, but as far as I know, as of right now I’ve given none. And I’m not about to start.” He reached for the leads.
“Wait,” Barb said frantically.
I wished there was something we could ask that would either confirm or deny his resistance to the drug since he was so convinced that he was immune. Even running this experiment there wasn’t necessarily a way to confirm his resistance to the drug because he needed to do certain things to get the reading. “Can you think of a casual test?” I asked Barb.
Barb bent down and got right in Zeke’s face. So close she could probably kiss him with one slight move. Jealousy reared again. “What’s her name?”
But Zeke just stared into her deep, dark chocolate eyes and said, “No.”
“Come on,” she said enticingly and ran a single finger down his arm. I wanted to punch her. “You can tell me. I’m a friend of Lucas’s. A good friend.” Her voice was sultry, seductive.
“No.” Zeke shook his head, frowned, and lifted his hand to tug at his hair and grasped nothing. Then his brows lifted as if he’d remembered he’d cut it. “Not gonna happen.”
Barb straightened. “Pretty good verbal resistance.”
He powered down the laptop. All without looking at either Barb or me. When the laptop was off, and closed he turned to us.
“I’ll finish the experiment the exact same way we did the other one.” She completed the same steps, and labeled this file, “Zeke, Under the influence of SP and Attempt to divulge secrets, but didn’t give up the secrets.”
We waited while Barb saved the second test to the USB drive, then powered everything down and handed the drive to me. Zeke was still kind of out of it.
Zeke had grabbed my fingers and twisted our hands together. Barb stared down at our entwined fingers. “Um, you guys have a place to stay?”
“Aiding and abetting.” Zeke brushed his lips over my knuckles. “Not a good idea.”
“Where else are you going to go to analyze the data?”
She had a good point. We needed someplace to lay low until we heard back from Jamie and Lucas. Wasn’t gonna lie, I didn’t like the fact that we were dependent on so many other people. As a matter of fact, the reliance on others gave me the willies.
Barb took off the shapeless white lab coat. Underneath the generic covering, she wore black wide leg pants and a black and white hound’s-tooth crop jacket and simple black patent pumps. She reached into a matching black leather bag with black patent accents.
“Go back to my place.” She retrieved a single key on a Tufts University lanyard from the purse. “He’s going to need a few hours to recover from the drug. Even if he didn’t reveal any state secrets, Sodium Pentothal still packs a punch in dimming awareness and slowing reaction time.”
I studied Zeke for a minute watching the slow track of his vision. She was right. He was not at one hundred percent. I could use her computer to analyze the data we’d accumulated and see if there were any conclusions or if this morning had been a waste of time and a potential breach of Zeke’s safety.
I curled my fingers around the woven cotton. “Directions?”
Barb quickly rattled off instructions on how to get to her house. The sky was beginning to lighten and I knew I needed to get him out of there.
Zeke was borderline docile as we all walked together to the car. His lack of awareness was beginning to worry me.
“Good luck,” she called out.
“What about your key?”
“Just leave it in the entry.” Barb slid into the ‘in your face’ red car. “I’m headed out of town for a conference.”
I didn’t know what to say. “Thank you.”
She paused, one foot touching the ground. Barb gripped the door handle and glanced between Zeke and me, her gaze wistful. “Be careful.”
I nodded and started our stolen car. I drove quickly but didn’t dare go over the speed limit. Within fifteen minutes, I was pulling into the driveway of a very elegant French-style chateau with rear windows that overlooked a working vineyard. Barb had given me the code to her garage and I quickly entered it on the numeric pad installed on the frame. I drove inside as soon as the door went up.
I turned off the engine and jerked the key out. With economy of movement, I pressed the button for the garage door and breathed a sigh of relief after the door was down and all the light was eliminated and we were in the semi-darkness.
I peered in the car at Zeke. His head lolled against the passenger window and he was sound asleep. With his buzz cut, random patches of bald skin all over his skull, and his face slack h
e looked like a little kid worn out after a long day at the park.
My heart clenched at the thought of disturbing him. But he’d be more comfortable inside. I bent down and pressed one knee on the driver’s seat as I leaned awkwardly over the console to wake him up. I didn’t want to open the passenger door because he might accidently fall out of the car.
“Zeke,” I whispered.
But he didn’t stir. He snored softly and I huffed out a breath. “Zeke,” I tried again a little more loudly.
But he still didn’t wake.
So I caressed his shoulder, his muscles hard beneath my tentative touch. With that small contact, he jerked awake. His blue eyes, oddly so much darker in his tan face without the shadow of his curly hair, cleared within seconds of awareness. His palm cupped my cheek and he nuzzled his lips against my neck. The contact was sweet and affectionate.
“Sunshine.” He skimmed his lips along my jaw and pressed a tender kiss to my top lip, then repeated at the left corner, right corner, and then he sucked my bottom lip into his mouth. He pulled me off balance until I tumbled into his lap.
“Where are we?”
“Barb’s house.”
Zeke sat up straight and glanced around all teasing gone. “I was that out of it?”
“You still didn’t give anything away.” I could sense his unease.
He huffed out a breath in disgust. “We don’t know that for sure.”
“We do at least for today,” I said. “You refused to divulge your program, or any other secrets. You wouldn’t even tell Barb my name.”
“Information that didn’t matter.” He closed his eyes and thunked his skull against the headrest. Except he had refused to reveal my name to Barb. He had protected me even when he was out of it.
“So let’s go analyze the data.”
We let ourselves into Barb’s house. The chateau-style house was as refined and put together as she was, not an item out of place, no dust lingered on the wood surfaces, no dirty dishes stacked in the sink, no clean laundry piled on the sofa. Until I peered into her bedroom. Clothes littered the floor around what appeared to be a dirty laundry hamper as if she’d shot them like basketballs and missed.
That little inconsistency made me like her more. I peered into what I assumed was the guest bedroom. “You want to lie down?”
Zeke frowned. “No. Let’s see if we can find anything of significance.”
We worked on the data in a comfortable silence. Zeke was able to use an online website for translating statistical data into binary code of ones and zeroes. The memory coding for the experiment was set into binary code with one representing an active state and zero representing an inactive state.
Using a mathematical treatment called matrix inversion to compare patterns from one brain to another was the object of the original study. For our purposes, we were going to compare Zeke’s results against Zeke’s results. Once we did that, we would be able to assess the baseline where he set up the laptop and then verbally gave away information, and compare it to the second set of data, when we tried to get him to reveal secrets, both at the computer which he would have done if he’d given Susan Chen his program and verbally, and he had refused.
I stared at the graphs from the two sets of data. One thing was glaringly obvious. The end of the second set of data was vastly different from the first which meant that he hadn’t followed the same pattern.
In all of the standard tasks that Zeke had performed, the base coding through to the end of the task, the binary results were the same, even the one where he told Barb what he’d hacked at seventeen.
But the two instances where he’d refused to answer, giving away the key and revealing my name, had produced vastly different results. Which meant that he’d refused to give up his encryption program. The binary code was different.
We turned to each other. A sense of glee zinged through me. “According my analysis of this,” I couldn’t even finish I was so excited.
“I didn’t give Susan Chen the program.”
I threw my arms around his shoulders, and rubbed my cheek against his stubble. He wrapped his arms around me. The sense of coming home burst within me like a water balloon popping. Relief swelled.
My euphoria faded, and Zeke stiffened in my embrace as we both realized something crucial at the same time.
“If I didn’t give her the program, then who did?”
Thirty-Six
Zeke’s pleasure faded almost immediately as flaws in their data and results became clear. It really didn’t prove that he hadn’t given up classified information. It also didn’t disprove his theory. There were holes no matter how he looked at it.
His head spun with discouraging thoughts and absolute despair. “I’ll never know what really happened.”
Sunshine jumped up. His normally calm, laid back girl was agitated and waving her hands around. “There is a way.”
“Look, Sunshine. This was a great idea. Really thinking outside the box. But we didn’t necessarily move forward.”
She paced back and forth staring at the cream Berber carpeting as if it could help them out of this mess. “We need to ask Susan Chen. Tell her these results and demand her corroboration or denial once and for all.”
That might be the only option left.
The connections fired in his brain. If they could intercept Chen before her meeting with Krychef, Zeke could ask her what really happened. How did she get his program? Make it personal. When they’d interrogated her before, they hadn’t told her anything about the consequences of her having that program.
Hadn’t this been what he’d wanted since the moment they had captured her the first time? To have her tell him, tell the NSA, definitively that he either had or hadn’t given her and Liam his encryption program?
Except, he’d promised Jamie that he’d stay far away from the Chen/Krychef meet. Maybe he could ask Jamie to ask Susan. But when he dialed Lucas’s phone with his new burner, there was no answer. He clicked End without leaving a message.
“We know when and where she’s going to be.”
But he’d given his word.
As if she read his mind, she said, “I know you promised. But this is your life.”
She was right.
They did know where Susan Chen was going to be.
Zeke logged on and went to the chat room where Oliver had sent the details of his meeting with Susan Chen.
Clear as day, once you figured out the code, Oliver stated that he would give Chen her daughter if she handed over her research.
But some of the details had changed. He’d switched the meeting place. Zeke needed to let Jamie know. But if he talked to her, she might figure out that Zeke had something planned. So he texted Lucas on his new burner phone, identifying himself in code, and letting Jamie and Lucas know the new details of the meet. But Zeke tweaked the time, telling Jamie and Lucas that the meeting would take place ten minutes after the correct start time.
Zeke glanced at the clock on the wall. They had a few hours to get some shuteye. If they were going to intercept Chen before she met with Krychef, they had to get there early, find a defensible, well-hidden position and wait until she arrived.
He couldn’t help but verbalize his concern. “This is probably a bad idea.” On so many levels.
“Go on the premise that you didn’t give them your program.” Sunshine urged. “That someone else, much higher up, did.”
Zeke realized that was true of every single piece in this puzzle. Someone higher up gave Susan Chen the encryption program. Someone higher up had to let Oliver Krychef sneak back in to the country. Someone higher up had orchestrated the experimentation on the espionage agents. Someone higher up had to know that John Stanley married Stella. Someone higher up had engineered the original kill order.
But who?
That’s what they needed Stanley for. So after they cornered Susan Chen, they had to go after John Stanley.
But Chen first. They were going to need a disguise. Becau
se Jamie and Lucas’s objective was to capture both Chen and Krychef. And he had no idea if they planned to bring along reinforcements.
Zeke definitely didn’t want to make it a trifecta by giving them the opportunity to capture him too.
He might have to bolt out of there fast, but luckily both Chen and Krychef were higher value targets. At least, he hoped they were.
After all, Susan Chen escaped from the federal prison, and Oliver Krychef had managed to sneak back into the States even though he should have been on the DHS No Fly List.
Except, Zeke was wanted for treason. Shit. He might have to bolt.
Four hours later they were on their way to San Francisco. They planned to record Susan Chen confirming or denying that Zeke had given them his encryption program. Proof, again not admissible in court, but that was okay. The confession just needed to be enough to get Armbruster to back down on the charge of treason and Zeke’s arrest.
They still had over two hours until Susan Chen was supposed to meet her ex and trade her research for her daughter.
The more odd twist, the girl was Krychef’s daughter too.
“What kind of sick fuck uses his own kid?” Zeke wondered as they slowed down for construction on the road.
Sunshine shrugged. “Parents, grandparents, they all make choices that are a mystery to me.” Her voice was tinged with sadness.
Impulsively he reached for hand and squeezed. “You okay?” The contact soothed him, an unexpected mirror, since he was trying to soothe her.
“Yeah,” she said softly.
“You thinking about your mother?”
“We were so close.”
“Why don’t you check in with her?”
“After we deal with this.”
He figured she didn’t want anyone or anything to track her movements or find a way to draw her mother out.
“If you change your mind, you can use my phone.”
Sunshine scooted as close as she could and brushed a kiss across his cheek. “You’re so sweet.”
Zeke winced.
