The Throwaway

by Michael Moreci

  Everything except for Mark’s escape.

  The assassin pulled the car over, stopping in front of what Mark assumed was the international terminal at the Helsinki airport. She dug a letter-sized envelope out of the console on her door and passed it to Mark.

  “Passport,” the assassin said. “You’re Phil Young of Ohio. There’s also money in there and a phone.”

  Mark accepted the envelope solemnly, like he was a courier being passed a message that would save the world. And to him, that’s exactly what it was: a way to save his world.

  “A flight to D.C. departs on American Airlines in two hours,” the assassin continued. “Last I checked, there were still seats available.”

  Mark clutched his door, knowing this was his cue to leave, but he couldn’t. The assassin had defied her employers—powerful people—and risked her own neck saving him from the Russians and smuggling him out of the country. And now she was providing him with the means to get home. It was impossible to express the proper amount of thankfulness for that level of kindness and generosity, but Mark knew he had to try.

  “I—I still can’t believe you did all this for me. You saved my life and put yourself in danger. And for a stranger. I don’t know that there’s any way I can ever repay you or thank you enough.”

  The assassin grimaced; Mark could tell he was making her uncomfortable with his candid display of gratitude, as mild as it was. “Just get an answer to your question,” she said, staring straight ahead through her windshield.

  “What question?”

  “You want to know the why of it all, don’t you? That’s what’s slicing a hole in the pit of your stomach: You want to know why this Dale set you up.”

  “Yeah,” Mark said. “I do.”

  “You can ask him when you see him,” the assassin said, then she tapped her finger on Gregori’s laptop. “And you even have proof.”

  Mark shut the computer and looked over at the assassin. He knew it was time to go, just as he knew she didn’t want to hear any more awkward expressions of gratitude.

  “I promise you, he’s going to answer every question I have to ask,” Mark said, extending his hand out to the assassin. “And then he’s going to pay.”

  The assassin shook Mark’s hand, then nodded to the terminal. He opened the door, stepped out of the car, and watched the assassin’s SUV drive away until it was out of sight.

  Mark then turned toward the airport.

  He had a plane to catch.

  27

  Sarah and Aaron’s plans had leapt from ridiculous to absurd.

  It dawned on Sarah how out of touch with reality they’d gotten when Aaron retrieved his iPad and pulled up a three-dimensional architectural schematic of the Pentagon. They were studying ventilation shafts that led to the central mainframe—the place Aaron needed to break into and hack if they were going to find out what the Verge software was hiding—trying to figure out an entry point. If they could enter the ventilation system in a place Aaron wasn’t restricted to enter, they could tunnel their way through the building, unnoticed, and drop into the central mainframe. But even with the schematics, they had no idea where the ventilation shafts traveled. Which meant it was a stupid plan that would never work. And Sarah told Aaron as much.

  Aaron groaned and flopped back on the rock-hard sofa in the hotel they were holed up in. Earlier that morning, Sarah had called Jenna from a pay phone and instructed her to find someplace safe and stay there. People were after all of them, and Sarah wouldn’t be able to live with herself if Jenna or Aaron got hurt. But she knew none of them would be out of harm’s way until this entire conspiracy was blown wide open.

  “I just don’t know,” Aaron said, rubbing his forehead. “I mean, this is the Pentagon we’re trying to break into. Security is kind of their thing.”

  Sarah understood Aaron’s frustration; she felt it herself. Prior to them tossing around the idea of crawling through ventilation shafts undetected and hoping they’d magically wind up where they needed to be, and that they tripped no alarms in the process, their best idea was to start a fire near the central mainframe, evacuate the area, and sneak into the room during the chaos.

  Sarah didn’t even want to think about the bad ideas they’d conjured.

  “I know, I know,” Sarah said, pacing among the Chinese takeout boxes that littered the floor. “But there has to be a way.”

  “No,” Aaron scoffed. “There doesn’t have to be a way. It’s not like we can just walk right in there.”

  Sarah stopped dead in her tracks. “That’s it,” she said. “That’s exactly it.”

  “Um, what’s it?”

  “We’ve been wasting our time trying to think of these complicated ways to break into this mainframe room—ways neither one of us are capable of—when we just need to keep it simple: We’ll just walk right in.”

  Aaron laughed. Sarah stared at him.

  “Oh. You’re serious.”

  Sarah thought of Mark, who was a master of doing things he wasn’t supposed to and being places he didn’t belong. And his method, as he had explained it to Sarah, was twofold: catch people off guard, and always act like you belong. That’s all Sarah and Aaron needed to do. Simple as that, she thought, trying to convince herself.

  “You can get us to the central mainframe’s doors, right? Just not inside. Your security clearance can get us that far?”

  “It can get me that far. Not the wife of Mark Strain.”

  “I guess that means I won’t go as Sarah Strain,” she said with a devious smile. “Which means we have work to do.”

  Aaron groaned. “I really, really wish I had run away when you started telling me about all this conspiracy business. Like, literally run. Away from you.”

  “Come on, think of all the Chinese we’re getting to eat, guilt free, because of the sheer lunacy of this situation.”

  “I do love chow mein.”

  “That’s the spirit,” Sarah said, putting on her coat.

  “Wait—where are you going?”

  “I’m going to get hair dye and some cheap glasses,” Sarah said. “My disguise.”

  “And what should I do—besides order more Chinese?”

  Sarah stopped at the door and shot Aaron a cunning smile. She reveled in being on the path to outsmarting the bastards who’d tried to ruin her life. Payback was coming.

  “You’re a computer whiz,” Sarah said. “Start working on making me fake IDs.”

  * * *

  Sarah followed Mark’s first rule of getting into places you’re not supposed to get into:

  Catch people off guard.

  But this was the Pentagon, and that meant the standard for “off guard” was still more attentive than Sarah would have liked. The best chance they had at slipping into the mainframe was during the night shift, when security was reduced to one guard. Not only that, Aaron explained, but the day-shift guard, Melanie, also happened to specialize in IT systems. Which meant there was no bullshitting her. And bullshit was the nucleus of Sarah’s plan. Because Mark’s second rule was:

  Act like you belong.

  Aaron spent the day creating not only fake IDs for Sarah, but also an entire fictional persona. She was Erin Greene, an IT guru who’d been hired directly by the White House to conduct an independent study of the efficiency of all high-level security systems.

  When Aaron explained this to the night-shift guard, Hank, the man twisted his head on its axis and stared blankly ahead. For a second, Sarah thought they were busted, that their bullshit had been detected already. But then she realized Hank was just confused.

  “Wait … what?” he asked.

  “It has to be in the daily logs,” Aaron said, then cleared his throat for about the seventieth time. “Erin’s been with my team all day, going through our processes, workflow, stuff like that. I’m her guide.”

  “But why is she here so late?” Hank asked as he searched the logs.

  “Because I get paid for the contract’s completion, not its
duration,” Sarah responded, her tone stiff and direct. It was the no-nonsense way Erin communicated.

  Hank looked up from his computer screen and scanned Sarah with a suspicious eye. “Yeah, I’d do the same,” he said, then he continued to study the logs until he got to the end. Of course, he didn’t find the entry he’d been looking for. Because it didn’t exist. “There’s nothing here, and without official clearance, I can’t let either of you in.”

  “Well, um, are you sure—” Aaron began to stammer, until Sarah interrupted.

  “You heard Mr. Cutter here mention my job is to evaluate efficiency, correct?” Sarah asked. Erin didn’t like having her time wasted, so her question was equal parts inquiry and accusation; because if Hank had heard Aaron, he wouldn’t be gumming up the works.

  “I did,” Hank answered.

  “And that my contract was executed by the White House—the director of Homeland Security, as a matter of fact.”

  “I got that as well,” Hank admitted. Sarah could tell he was trying to maintain his posture, but she could hear the uncertainty creeping into his words. Hank didn’t know what to do. But Sarah did. After all, this is where Sarah belonged.

  “Then why are you contributing to your system’s inefficiency? I examined your logs this morning, Hank. I found three irregularities from today alone, which is why it’s no surprise my clearance is nowhere to be found.”

  “Let me just call,” Hank said. He placed his hand on the phone’s receiver, and Sarah took a step closer and placed her hand on Hank’s. It stopped him immediately.

  “Show some initiative, Hank,” Sarah said in a cool, hushed tone. “That’s what strong, successful people do.”

  “We won’t be in there more than a few moments. What do you really think we’re going to do?” Sarah took another step forward, nearly pressing her body against Hank’s. She could feel him quiver.

  “You won’t be in there long?” he asked, then swallowed hard.

  “We’ll be gone before you know it,” Sarah said, sending Hank a playful smile.

  Hank sucked in a deep breath and allowed them inside. Sarah withheld a massive sigh of relief—which would have been out of character—until she and Aaron were safely inside.

  “That was, like, some Jedi mind shit,” Aaron said as they hurried away from the central mainframe’s entrance. With the rush of the moment wearing off, Sarah felt like she was going to be sick.

  “That was just the first step,” Sarah said. “Now comes the hard part.”

  “Piece of cake,” Aaron said, waving off Sarah’s concerns. “Follow me.”

  The central mainframe was like a hedge maze, only with the shrubbery replaced by obsidian towers, about Sarah’s height, that were dimly lit by the soft blue glow of their internal processors and motherboards and other computer stuff that Sarah didn’t understand. But she didn’t have to; that’s what Aaron was there for. So, she followed Aaron through the dark space, unable to discern one row of towers from another, hoping he had something brilliant up his sleeve.

  “You know what you’re looking for, right?” she asked, keeping her voice hushed, just in case.

  “Nah, I’m just playing it by ear.”

  “Aaron, now’s not the time,” Sarah scolded.

  “Yes, of course I know what I’m looking for,” Aaron admitted. “It’s just a matter of what I’m able to accomplish when we get there.”

  Aaron led Sarah down a row like all the others, but he seemed to know what he was looking for. He counted off the towers one by one and, as they got closer to the center of this particular row, he started to peek inside. Each tower had a rectangular opening at eye level, and Aaron muttered to himself as he examined … something. Sarah was just anxious to get this done, and she didn’t care much about the details.

  “Ah, here it is,” he said as he tapped the tower’s thick metal shell. “This is the one—the gateway to the Verge software’s core operations. If we’re going to learn anything about what it’s really up to, this is where we’ll do it.”

  “And you can crack the code or … whatever’s hidden in there?” Sarah asked, starting to pace.

  Aaron shrugged and laughed nervously.

  “Oh man,” Sarah huffed.

  Cautiously—and, more important, quietly—Aaron removed the tower’s cover. Its interior revealed a series of crisscrossing wires, flashing bulbs, and myriad slots Sarah couldn’t even venture to guess the purpose of. Aaron grabbed his laptop from his backpack and plugged it into one of the tower’s outlets.

  “So, yeah, in theory I should be able to swipe all the information stored inside this bad boy,” he replied.

  “What do you mean in theory?” Sarah asked, trying not to get fuming mad at Aaron. “Maybe you should have mentioned this detail, I don’t know, before we broke into the Pentagon’s computer mainframe?”

  “I mean, look—it’s not like I can just type in ‘command, colon, show me secret nefarious program’ and find what we need,” Aaron said. “It’s going to take time.”

  “How much time?”

  “If I knew exactly what I was looking for and the route to get there? No time at all. If I’m blindly looking for a needle in the program’s haystack? That could take days.”

  “And you are?”

  “Closer to the former.”

  Sarah withdrew a long, worried breath. “Jesus, Aaron.”

  “Relax,” he said, sitting down and positioning his computer on his lap. His eyes were fixated on the glowing screen in front of him. “I’m good at what I do. Remember that.”

  As Sarah wore out the floor beneath her feet, she removed her phone from her back pocket and started typing in a message.

  “Please tell me you’re not on any form of social media,” Aaron said.

  “Of course not. I’m texting Dale Schmidt—you know him, right? Mark’s mentor, the politician?”

  “Maybe,” Aaron said, absently. “Politicians are all just politicians to me.”

  “Well, Dale’s on our side. He’s the one who put me on this trail, and he wanted me to contact him if I came across anything. Correct me if I’m wrong, but it seems like we’re about to find ourselves a big something.”

  Aaron hummed, considering. “Maybe it’s better if you didn’t tell him anything. At least not yet.”

  “Look, Dale’s one of the few people I can trust, and I kind of want someone else to know that we’re in here. Just in case.”

  Aaron raised his head from the screen and let Sarah’s reasoning sink in. “Right,” he agreed. “When you put it that way.”

  Sarah danced her fingers over the screen, letting autocorrect do most of the work as she crafted a message to Dale. She had found something, the text read. Something with the software from Mark’s deal with Verge. She was in the Pentagon’s central mainframe with a friend, trying to find out what this software really did.

  After firing off the message, Sarah’s nerves went even tauter. She expected to hear back from Dale immediately. A confirmation. A reassurance that they’d make things right. But five minutes passed without a response, and Sarah worried that she’d made a terrible mistake revealing so much information through a text message. It was careless.

  Ten minutes passed. Sarah’s anxiety grew until she was not only pacing, but breathing like she’d just run a marathon.

  “What, are you going into labor already?” Aaron asked. “Chill out—you’re making me more nervous, and I was already on the cusp of fully freaking out before we did something that would land us in prison.”

  Sarah stopped. She knew getting herself so worked up wasn’t helping anyone, and if there was one thing she needed right now—and for whatever was going to happen next—it was sharp wits and steely nerves. Looking back on where this all started, Sarah took stock of how far she’d come. She reminded herself that if she could endure some of the horrifying things she had witnessed and helped remedy as an ER nurse, she could withstand anything. And that’s all this was: trauma that needed to be remed
ied. If she didn’t freak out when assisting in the removal of a chunk of steel girder from a construction worker’s abdomen, then she could keep her cool during this as well.

  “Holy shit, I’ve found something,” Aaron suddenly said. Sarah stood behind Aaron; she was ready.

  “Found something what?” she asked.

  “Um,” Aaron stammered, “this is … this is bad.”

  “You’re going to have to fill me in here, Aaron. What is it?”

  “It’s … it’s everywhere,” Aaron said, his eyes mesmerized on the screen in front of him. “Nobody would find this. Not until so much damage had been done. It’s so eloquent, so … advanced.”

  Sarah considered slapping Aaron and ordering him to snap out of it, but she restrained herself. She’d give him one more chance to pull himself together without her assistance. “Aaron, if you don’t get a grip and start explaining—”

  Aaron turned to Sarah. His face couldn’t be any more flushed if he’d just seen his own ghost. “Okay, okay,” he said, getting ahold of himself. “See, this program, the one Verge sold Mark on, was supposed to be a new and totally advanced way to stop hackers from getting into the Pentagon. I mean, people try to break into our system all the time. All. The. Time. And from everything I’ve seen, Verge’s software does exactly that. But there’s something else.”

  Aaron ran his hands over his face, his fingers through his hair. Sarah saw beads of sweat collect at his temple and start to dribble down his cheek. Aaron had been nervous before, maybe even afraid. Now? Now he was unnerved.