by Fiona Quinn
“Maybe. But at the hospital, Bilik said Colonel Guthrie called him,” Gage noted.
“You said there was a deal between Israel and Montrim for forty million. I can see Montrim getting through my computer firewalls. But they couldn’t get through DARPAs.”
Gage picked up the pen and pointed to Guthrie’s name on the paper. “What if this was a private deal between Bilik, Guthrie and the Mossad? Guthrie had access.”
“Absolutely. And you put my phone on airplane mode in my apartment. Guthrie could have determined that after you left his house. He became worried that the phone was off or lost or—”
“No. This doesn’t fit neatly together. I don’t think Guthrie knew about the break-in at your apartment. He seemed genuinely upset when I went by his house to tell him. And he was also surprised that Lily was dead when Senator Billings showed up at his house drunk.”
“I think that that’s where the chemistry analogy went wrong. I think it’s more like a Venn Diagram. There are some holes. Who needed to stop the hearing? Who would benefit the most?”
“Montrim,” Gage said without any doubt.
“What if Guthrie and Bilik decided to guard Montrim to protect a private deal they were doing with Israel. A forty-million-dollar deal couldn’t be hidden. I don’t know how they could do that as a corporate entity and keep that hidden from the US military.” Zoe paused, thinking. “Say it’s just Bilik and Guthrie in on that deal, they really needed to save Montrim Industries.”
“Save them for two reasons that we know about—there’s an Israeli deal on the table and a CIA deal on the table. If the Federal government severed ties, whoever was orchestrating those deals would lose access to the data for both deals.”
“My thoughts exactly.” Zoe nodded. “Okay, now Guthrie tells Bilik. Bilik, by the way, is a big-time donor to USIPAC, and that would give him the connections to approach Israel with the database information. It could very well have been Bilik who handed over the card for the PI, told Guthrie to convince Billings to have Lily followed, and arranged for USIPAC to both move Lily to her own place and pay for the PIs bill. You said that the PI kept following Lily after Billings said to stop. If the guy was working for USIPAC, he’d still be working the case, right?”
“Yeah, I don’t know about that,” Gage said. “Why would USIPAC do that? Why wouldn’t they put a PI on Lily and not triangulate with Billings? For that matter, why wouldn’t Bilik fire Lily?”
“I wouldn’t fire her,” Zoe said. “It’s like that Montrim scientist, George Matthews, who was spying on the soundwave technology studies and selling the updates to China. What did the investigators do? The scuttlebutt is that Montrim hired agents in to watch him to see who all was involved and how the operation worked. Only when they had all the pieces of the puzzle did the guy disappear. I would guess the FBI is dealing with him.”
“That makes sense,” Gage agreed. Montrim, or maybe Bilik and Guthrie, wanted to learn from Lily what the senator knew and how he was going to go about taking down Montrim. They would have discussed this at Lily’s house, provided by USIPAC, which I’d guess was fully wired for audio visual.” Gage pulled a fresh piece of paper over and started scrawling notes. “If nothing else that would give them black mail material.” Now he realized why Zoe had filled so many pages. This wasn’t a straight line. This was the convergence of variables. “Prescott needs to go check for bugs, though whoever planted them probably pulled them out again.”
“The PI was associated with this group of Israeli special ops,” Zoe said. “Who else is a player here?”
Gage thought back to his pocket full of business cards and two of them were from, “The CIA.”
“Is it possible that the CIA could have rewarded the Israeli special ops guys for some action, some piece of intel, with a viable cover story of their deaths, and then brought the unit to the US under new names? They can do that, can’t they?”
“They can.” Gage dragged out the words, thinking that was more stuff of movies than reality. “They do. But it would be one hell of a reward.”
“If anyone could warrant that reward it would be these guys. Let’s say they had CIA operatives in danger’s way, and these guys had the wherewithal to get them out. That might be an even exchange. Right?”
“Yes.” Shit, they might have made that kind of deal.
“The CIA may use these guys from time to time to do things that they couldn’t get away with on US soil. There may be some reason that they got those tattoos and kept up their training. I put the CIA in that loop for keeping Montrim viable, not because they know about the sale of BIOMIST data, but because they really want the killer wasp, RoboSphecius, in play.” Zoe pointed to some of her symbolic math that meant zero to Gage. “What if the CIA ordered Lily to be killed to protect Montrim—she could no longer testify and the affair would discredit Senator Billings. And what if that same night they also send two of their guys to capture me? In that case, the CIA killed Lily to keep Montrim viable because they wanted their RoboSphecius. And they could have tried to kidnap me to force me to make it for them. And as I say it out loud, I find all of this ludicrously outside the realm of actual reality. But if there’s even a hair of truth to that tale, the CIA could only know about the WASP from one direction and that’s—”
“Guthrie,” Gage growled.
“Guthrie may not have known about the hit on Lily or that I was to be captured. He may have thought that I was safe in all of this. He could actually be completely innocent of any wrongdoing, and only passed DARPA intel to the CIA as his position required. I want to believe that. He’s been friends with Senator Billings for a very long time. And he’s been a friend of my dad’s even longer. Colonel Guthrie is like family to me. But his innocence doesn’t mean that he had no hand in this outcome. It seems to me he was the engine that drove this bus. I believe that. I think if we bring this to the attention of Iniquus and the FBI, that they will be able to find the proof that Guthrie inadvertently created this fiasco with Bilik and the CIA. Guthrie was duped. He was a pawn, I’m sure. But he’s the connector. I bet he can help us figure out what’s happening.”
“We need to get back to Iniquus, Zoe. They need to hear this. Now.”
Chapter
Thirty-Nine
GAGE
Zoe piled into the car beside Gage, putting her purse on the floor near her feet, and pulling her safety belt into place. The interior of the car was as beat to hell as the exterior, but the engine hummed, the tires were first rate, and it maneuvered like a sports car.
Gage pressed the button on the dash and the garage door closed behind them. He pushed the button to the right.
“Communications,” came the man’s voice.
“Gage Harrison, Panther Force, Zoe Kealoha and I are heading to Iniquus Headquarters. Our ETA is forty-five minutes.”
“Copy. We have you on satellite. Be advised there is a road crew ahead. Traffic is being detoured, we estimate an additional ten minutes to your drive time.”
“Roger. Out.” He tapped the button again.
“That’s handy,” Zoe said.
They drove in silence down the country road. They were the only ones around. Gage enjoyed the quiet, and the stark beauty of the winter landscape. But his head was still on a swivel. It was illegal for the CIA to operate, for the most part, in the United States, but that didn’t mean much, especially in this case. Zoe’s research put her square in the sphere of CIA intelligence gathering. And they were the masters when it came to technology. They could be following their progress down this lonely road the same way Iniquus was. Their only real safety was in the anonymity they gained through the grocery store car switch.
Gage was glad that he had a heads up from Iniquus that there was construction up ahead. He was ready for it when he saw a flagman. Iniquus had said it was a detour, though. That’s not what was happening here. This guy held a stop sign. Gage slowed to a roll. There were ditches on either side, and this Olds had a low-slung body. He pushed
the comms button.
“Communications.”
“Gage here. Heads up, we’re at the construction crew. There’s a flagman. I’m inching up on a stop sign.”
“Copy.”
Gage could see men with their backs to him in the road and dirt that looked freshly dug.
“There’s another flagman ahead, holding back two cars,” the comms guy said.
The workers moved out of the road. The flagman spoke into his radio. He spun the sign to “slow” and waved them through.
Gage tapped the gas to pick up speed as he maneuvered left to go around the digger. As they moved over the dirt, four pops sounded like rifle fire. Gage’s right hand shot out and dragged Zoe’s head down to her lap. He stomped the gas pedal to the ground, and the car moved forward on the hard edges of his run flat tires. He’d hit a spike strip.
Two cars, one in the left lane, one in the right, barreled toward them. Gage slammed his foot on the brake until they jerked to a stop. He threw the car in reverse, burning rubber as he tried to backtrack out of this ambush. All the while Gage was calling the play by play to the communication tech, hoping they had some Iniquus guys somewhere nearby.
The digger moved across the road before Gage could make it past. They were trapped.
“Zoe, sit up and put your hands in the air,” Gage said with as much steadiness as he could muster.
“Communications. Listening in silence. Iniquus support is mobilized to your location. We have you locked on satellite. We can see everything,” the man said.
“Look, Zoe, they’ve pulled ski masks over their faces. That means they don’t want to be identified. They aren’t here to kill you. They’re going to take you prisoner.” They turned to each other. “Zoe, I need you to be strong. Give them whatever they want. Do whatever they want. We’ll figure out how to undo that later. Don’t try to be a hero.”
Zoe never missed a thing. “You said they’ll take me prisoner. What will they do to you?”
The butts of a pair of rifles smashed through their windows, showering them with safety glass. Men dressed in tactical gear stepped up with pistols in their hands.
“Colonel Guthrie,” Zoe’s shocked voice called out as darts pierced their necks.
Gage felt the medication flowing into his artery.
Zoe spun back to look at him with bewilderment and fear, yanking the dart from her skin. “Gage, oh my God. I’m so sorry.”
Chapter
Forty
Zoe
Women are like wasps in their anger.
~ English proverb
“If you didn’t want to help the CIA and our military, why the hell did you sign a contract with DARPA, Zoe?”
Zoe swallowed. She was seated on a folding metal chair in the middle of a room painted pink, with circus animals dancing around the border paper. She had pulled herself out of her stupor about an hour ago. But she was still a little wobbly. She stuck her feet out on either side of her like a bicycle kick stand to hold herself upright.
There was a table with a computer, it was pointed at her, and Zoe imagined that this conversation was being recorded.
She had recognized Colonel Guthrie at the side of the car, despite his face mask. Now that they were inside, he’d pulled his disguise off and stood red-faced and seething in front of her. She had never seen him look like this before. Zoe was afraid. Afraid for herself. Afraid for Gage. She wondered if he was still alive.
“How did you find me?” Zoe demanded. Anger boiled under her skin.
“Grossman and Parker need the WASP functioning. They got a heads-up from the CIA that you were at Iniquus. With CIA technology, the rest isn’t rocket science. And speaking of science,” Guthrie kicked the leg of her chair, “why’d you sign a DARPA contract if you didn’t want to help your country?”
Zoe grabbed the seat lest she go flying. “I watched a YouTube video about 9-11. Not about the towers coming down, but about the greatest maritime rescue effort in human history. A half-million people were plucked off Manhattan Island by the men and women who worked on boats in the area. The Coast Guard put out a call, ‘if you can, come help.’ The boats converged. At the beginning of the video they posted the Romain Rolland quote, ‘A hero is a man who does what he can.’”
Colonel Guthrie reached out to swipe a tear that brightened the corner of Zoe’s lashes. “Are you crying?”
She smacked his hand away. She wondered where her glasses were. She’d feel much better if she could see clearly. “I can do biomedical engineering and microrobotics. If my inventions mean saving lives, then that’s what I stepped up to do. And it’s not just for military applications. My inventions, once they’re out of prototype, can have an impact on making our law enforcement more effective.”
“Again, I’m asking you why you signed up. It’s because you want to help your country. You’re a patriot, aren’t you, Zoe?”
“I love my country. I want what’s best for my country.”
“Your country needs you. The CIA needs you. We need, for the best future of America, to have the RoboSphecius in play. The CIA needs them to function in a little over four months. That should be enough time for you to get them flying, so to speak.”
Zoe’s brows came together. “That’s the timeline you gave me for the WASPs to function for military intelligence.”
Colonel Guthrie shook his head with a sigh. “We need both. A WASP to identify and monitor the mark, and a RoboSphecius to find your beacon and sting the target. Once you have one that’s actionable, the second is easy. It’s the same damned mechanism with a different fluid. Getting the WASP to identify the right person. That’s the big deal.”
“All along, I’ve been developing a CIA project.”
“Of course. I can’t understand why this is a problem for you. You want to save lives. This is a no-brainer. When your WASP identifies a subject, instead of bombing the compound, we can take out the single culprit. How many lives could you save, Zoe? How many innocents?”
“Colonel, that argument is myopic, simplistic, illogical and completely beside the point.”
“Do tell.”
“I will never develop a means of killing. Identification? Yes. Killing? No. I will not be responsible for anyone else’s death. Period. My developing a means of identification is meant to prevent bombs from being used in error. I am not responsible for the decisions that come after. For example, the military could choose to track that person until they are in seclusion and then take them out. They can send in a sniper. If others decide to take out a complex, that’s on them. Once my microrobotics and software are functional, they become part of the human experience. That means other scientists can and will do the same. I will not provide the world with a new weapons system by adding to the knowledge scaffolding. Scientific knowledge is accumulative, and we don’t know where this could lead.”
“Enough. You are far too naïve to weigh the ethics of your recalcitrance.” Colonel Guthrie leaned his hips into the table with the laptop. As he bumped it, the screen filled with an image.
Zoe squinted at the screen, not sure what she was seeing. Guthrie pulled her purse toward him and handed her her glasses.
Now the image was crystal clear. Gage sat in a chair. His face was bloody. His clothes were ripped. He looked dazed. His hands were cuffed in place. His feet were shackled.
Zoe jumped from her chair.
“Sit your ass down!” Colonel Guthrie yelled at her. “Gage is our incentive. He’s going to stay with us for a while. Right there in that chair.” He pointed at the video. “You want him to eat? You behave. You want him to drink? You behave. You want him to get up and use the bathroom instead of pissing down his leg and sitting in his own filth? You behave.”
Zoe gasped. “Are you going to kill me? Kill Gage?”
“With a brain like yours? Why would I do that? You’re an asset. Kill Gage? That depends. You will do whatever I tell you to do. Sign whatever I tell you to sign.”
“Of course,” she said.
She looked around the child’s room again. “How am I to work here?”
“Not here. You need your laboratory, obviously. You will go home. You will go to work. You will make progress. You won’t try any cute tricks to make things self-destruct or tell me that you need more time. Gage Harrison’s life is on a time clock. March fifteenth—three months from today—if we don’t have the two kinds of wasps operationally ready, I will personally electrocute Gage in front of you with a low enough voltage that it will be an excruciatingly slow and painful death.”
Zoe started vibrating. She shook so hard; she could hardly keep herself planted on the seat.
“And that’s when I call your parents. I’ll tell them you’ve gone missing, and they need to come to DC right away, stay at my house. And we will start again. And if they die, then we will go after your friends. I will be relentless. I will be heartless. I will be the devil himself. I will have these wasps.” Colonel Guthrie moved over and leaned in until their noses touched. “Do I make myself clear?” he spat out, his eyes demonic. Everything about this man made Zoe recoil.
“And if you think you can find a way to get a message to Iniquus or your buddy Damion Prescott, be aware that you will have a shadow six inches from your elbow until I am satisfied. You won’t eat alone. You won’t sleep alone. You won’t bathe or pee alone. There will always be one of my men six inches away. And let me tell you, they have lost seven of their unit members to this FUBAR op already. They aren’t feeling magnanimous when it comes to you. I’d tread carefully where they’re concerned.”
Zoe went numb. Her mouth fell open. Her brain failed her completely. She loved her brain. It was her super power. But when she needed it, it let her down. Nothing came to her. No stories to help her find a way clear. No clever ideas. She was nothing but an autonomic nervous system, exchanging oxygen for carbon dioxide.
