If there’s anything that can protect you from a killer fly, Ellis thought, I’d like to see it. But she couldn’t think about herself right now. Someone had killer Drucker, presumably because he had agreed to discuss an article he had published more than a decade ago. She had to get her hands on that book of his before someone else did.
“I’ve got to get to Drucker’s condo,” she said. “It’s in Silver Springs.”
Speers’ glare could have wilted sunflowers. “Are you deaf? I just finished saying I want you out of the field until we know who did this.”
“Who’s going to go, you? This isn’t something you can just delegate. The president said she wanted to keep the team small. Besides, I’m the only person that knows what we’re looking for.”
Speers reached into his pocket grudgingly. “I’ll drive.”
Nathan Drucker Residence
Silver Springs, Maryland
A curvy 20-something office manager wearing yoga pants and a hoodie staffed the leasing office where Nathan Drucker had lived. After agreeing to let Ellis and Speers into the deceased journalist’s condo, she led them up the building’s stairwell. “This isn’t my career,” she volunteered, although they had not even asked about her ambitions. “I’ve got a degree in communications from Duke. I had an internship last year, but it didn’t pay. I’m just doing this until I can get into something more permanent.”
“I’m sure something will turn up,” Speers offered as they came to Drucker’s third-floor condo.
“Getting a job must’ve been way easier in your day,” the manager said as she fumbled through an enormous set of keys. Speers let the age comment go. He was just happy the girl didn’t ask them to get a warrant.
The extent of Drucker’s paranoia was evident by two bulky cameras mounted over the front door, holdovers from before the era of miniaturization. No less than four dead bolts secured the entrance.
“The building association must have loved those,” Ellis said, motioning to the cameras. “Did Drucker live alone?”
“He’s got two kids that visit every now and then, but they live with the ex-wife.” The girl unlocked the second deadbolt, and then turned. “Hold on. Why are you talking about him in the past tense?”
Ellis shot her boss a glare before rolling her eyes.
“I’m afraid Mr. Drucker is deceased,” Speers said with a note of awkward finality.
“Oh my God. Is his body in there? Are we about to see a corpse?”
“No,” Speers said. “Look, I need to ask you to keep this under your hat. We haven’t even notified family yet.”
Rattled, the girl unlocked the last two deadbolts. The apartment was completely dark. Out of habit, Ellis held Speers at the entrance as the manager walked in to flip on the lights. She used the other hand to open her purse and grope for her SIG. In Iraq, her unit had a couple of nasty experiences during home invasions. It was amazing what naughty things people could do with a little trip wire and basic explosives.
All seemed to be quiet. Satisfied that the spacious condo was still secure, Ellis went in, noting that the place had not been ransacked. She counted them lucky. If someone had taken the time to kill Drucker in a public place, it was only a matter of time before they showed up here.
They went from room to room until they found Drucker’s study. The converted bedroom would have scarcely been wide enough to hold a queen-size bed. The walls held Drucker’s UCLA degree, as well as framed movie posters for ‘All the President’s Men,’ ‘State of Play’ and the George Clooney movie about TV journalist Ed Murrow, ‘Good Night, and Good Luck.’ All movies about heroic journalists. That figures, Speers thought. Drucker probably thought they’d make a movie about him someday. But journalists never died in the movies.
There was a computer, a printer, and also an old-fashioned analog typewriter. “This would look cool in my office,” Speers said, admiring the Smith Corona’s sleek black curves.
“It might look like a museum piece, but I think Drucker was actually using it.”
“I don’t understand those analog sentimentalists. Like those people who play vinyl records. It’s just backwards.”
“In this case, it was a security measure. A typewriter is the literary equivalent of paying cash for everything. It’s not digital, it’s far less likely to be traced, found or stolen.”
Speers unplugged Drucker’s computer and began boxing up his papers for analysis back at the office. Ellis searched through two tall filing cabinets, discovering nothing. She then went back to the living room, where the office manager had her feet up on Drucker’s coffee table and was peering into her phone. “How much longer?” she said without looking up.
“As long as it takes.” Ellis went back to the study. She climbed atop the rickety desk while Speers steadied her legs, then pushed open one of the ceiling panels and, fearing a chance encounter with a rat trap, used a plastic back scratcher to poke around in the unseen darkness. Moments later she hit something. She reached in with her hands, pulled, and was soon holding a rectangular box filled with something heavy. Behind it, she found two more that were identical. She handed the boxes one by one to Speers, grunting a little with each heave.
Then she climbed down and opened the first box. It was filled with several legal pads, as well as a bunch of old mini-cassette tapes. “I’d venture a guess that these are…”
“Interview transcriptions,” Speers confirmed after taking a quick look at the content.
He opened the second box. In it, he found a two-inch thick pile of typewritten paper. There was no cover sheet. The double-spaced type started on the first page, and it was crowded with handwritten annotations.
The third box contained a manuscript printed in bluish text, with margins that had tiny holes in it. “This came out of a dot matrix printer,” Speers said. “We actually had one of these things when we were kids. They were really noisy.”
“I think I saw one in the Smithsonian,” Ellis said. Speers chuckled before realizing that his younger subordinate hadn’t been joking.
Ellis opened the closet and found a large trail-grade backpack. She put the contents of the three boxes into it.
Glass exploded somewhere in the apartment. Stunned for only a moment, Ellis motioned for Speers to stay quiet.
She drew her Beretta and spun out into the hallway. The manager was in the living room about 20 feet in front of her, bending to inspect whatever had just been thrown through the living room window. Ellis didn’t need to get any closer to know it was bad news.
“Run!” she shouted at the manager before ducking back into the study. There was no time to try to save her. “Cover up,” she told Speers. They had only just gotten their hands over their ears when a blast rocked the entire floor.
If the size of the explosion hadn’t made it obvious, the amount of plaster whizzing past the study confirmed that the office manager was toast.
Waves of regret coursed through Ellis. Not just for failing to instruct the office manager to leave the premises, but also for involving Julian. She should have come alone. Now both their lives were in danger.
In Iraq, Ellis had learned that explosions were sometimes just a prelude to armed entry. Ellis was willing to bet that at least two invaders would be inside as soon as the dust and smoke cleared. She stood and then pulled Speers to his feet. The paunchy intelligence director was unarmed, and would be of little value in a firefight. They had no choice but to try to escape.
“Take a deep breath and hold it,” Ellis instructed. She shouldered the heavy backpack containing the manuscript and stepped out into the hallway, leading Speers by the hand. The air was filled with particles that made her eyes burn.
They went into the room opposite the study, heading straight for the window. She looked outside, hoping for a cable they could slide down, a rooftop close enough to jump to, or a fire escape. All she saw was a brick wall, with only enough clearance for a set of flowerpots.
She led Speers back into the hallway. Someone
was shouting now. It could be anyone, she reminded herself. But as she looked back toward what had been Drucker’s living room, the sight of three red laser dots squelched any hope of heading out the front entrance. Drucker’s killers were already here.
She led Speers to the back bedroom and shut the door behind them. Next to the door was a tall maple wood wardrobe. With Speers’ help, she toppled it so that it was blocking the door sideways. She didn’t want to make a stand here, but at least it might stop someone from kicking down the door for a while.
Two windows looked out over a dimly lit courtyard. Once again, there were no tree branches or wires within reaching distance from the window, nor was there a fire escape. That, she realized, would have been outside the living room, which the invaders had no doubt utilized to their advantage.
“Look,” Speers said, opening the window on the other side of the bedroom.
Three floors down was a community swimming pool, illuminated by a pair of lights at the bottom. There was nobody there at this time of night. Even from her angle at the other window, the water was clearly too far to jump.
“No,” Speers said, pointing straight down. “Down there!”
Ellis’ view was blocked. Before she could stop him, Speers already had one leg out the window. She lunged, grabbing for his other leg just as he let go. They both screamed as he jumped.
Several gunshots ripped through the top portion of the door, above the substantial protection that the heavy wardrobe offered. Rays of light emanated from each hole in the door.
She pulled off the backpack, knowing that it would inhibit her ability to break her fall, and tossed it out the window without looking. Ellis turned, firing three rounds through the door just before she leapt. There was no hope of killing three assassins equipped for night operations.
She crossed herself. Then she jumped.
Eurostar Express Train
The Eurostar running from Verona to Rome sped past a vast field of grapevines that were heavy with fruit and ready for harvest. On the right, a hill town came into view. A citadel-like village surrounded by ancient stone walls and topped with medieval architecture. Completely unblemished by billboards, high rises or neon signs, it had hardly been the first jaw-dropping scene they had passed so far. But unlike his fellow passengers, Nico was oblivious to the bucolic scenery. He was about to boot up a beautiful new machine.
He savored the feel of the round power button on the sleek computer Carver had purchased for him. He grazed his finger over the button several times before finally depressing it, savoring the satisfying whirr of the processor flickering to life.
During the 13 months spent hiding on South Africa’s Eastern Cape, he had kept his vow to Madge. No computers in the house. No web-accessible phones. No temptations. Except for the occasional trip down to the hotel, where the night manager had obliged his indulgences.
It had been for his own good, he knew. After all, it had been his inability to control his urges that had put him in lockup in the first place. But in a world where bills were paid online, customers paid for access to entertainment rather than owning it, and paper maps were relics of the 20th century, going web-free had been a difficult promise to keep.
He had managed the inevitable inner conflict mostly by immersing himself in the Xhosa and Afrikaans languages. Becoming fluent in both languages, as well as taking on the challenge of teaching himself how to fish the Transkei riverways, had proven to be surprisingly rewarding. In recent months, the old impulses had nearly died off.
He had lapsed just once, after finding a discarded phone in a Transkei garbage dump. Rooting the phone to steal free web access had been more than the Internet-starved hacker could resist. For three nights in a row, he had pretended to fall asleep, only to get up in the dead of night to explore the ever-changing universe of net security on the phone’s tiny screen. With Nico increasingly ragged and temperamental from his all-nighters, Madge finally recognized the warning signs and demanded that he hand over the contraband device.
Now the familiar rush of adrenalin returned to him as he logged onto the hotspot provided by Carver’s satphone. The encryption key was impossibly long, which only intensified the pleasure when the first site appeared before his eyes. But once he got started, the download speed was blazingly fast. Incomprehensible compared to anything he had ever experienced before.
Carver placed a Limonata and a pastry on the tray before him. With the train worker strike apparently still on, Carver had bought ahead, making sure they wouldn’t be hungry or thirsty on the trip to Rome. Nico set the food and drink aside and continued his bonding session with the new machine.
Before boarding in Verona, Carver had explained his immediate objective. Going on the presumption that a hidden relationship between Senator Rand Preston and Sir Nils Gish existed, he was to use any means necessary to expose any possible connections. For now, they would leave the mysterious case of Mary Borst’s disappearance aside, although he could tell that whether he liked it or not, that some portion of Carver’s brain was still working on it.
He would start by analyzing the two politicians’ itineraries, both private and public, looking for any overlap in destinations or meeting places. He would then pull a full social graph for the two men, working up a full profile on any first and 2nd second-degree contacts that the two men had in common.
Virtually any tactic was fair game. They had already received Preston’s personal email data from the FBI, and Carver was working on getting Gish’s. That was about all the risk-free help they were going to get. They could not reach out directly to private companies for account access, for fear of exposing the investigation.
The quickest way to discover who these men were, and where they had been, was to follow their money. That meant breaking into their credit card accounts. Nico salivated at the thought of it. In the old days, he had favored bringing down financial networks through denial-of-service attacks. He had formed cyber gangs of users from different geolocations to overwhelm networks with the number of simultaneous requests needed to bring them to their knees.
Unfortunately, that type of offensive was no longer an option. He hadn’t maintained his contacts in the hacker community during his exile. And even if he had, involving them would be too much of a risk. The sensitive nature of the operation required extreme discretion. As an alternative, he could enslave a great number of machines, masking the IP of each through a randomized spoofing process. In the past, his favorite targets had been large American state universities like Penn State. Any institution with a hefty on-campus population, where large numbers of students would create and eventually abandon accounts, was perfect. Nico would simply revive those accounts and use them for his own means.
He wasn’t yet privy to the details of the case, but he figured that Carver wouldn’t have come all the way to South Africa if the stakes were small. And that was just fine by him. High stakes suited him.
Now he felt alive in a way that he had not in ages.
He thought of Madge. Poor lonely Madge, who had left her good home and good job in America to hide from the law with him. Who had, even before that, written him dozens of letters in prison because she wanted to reform him.
And then, as quickly as he had felt high on adrenaline, a wave of guilt washed over him. Damn, he thought. I don’t even miss her.
He shrugged and opened the can of Limonata.
Nathan Drucker Residence
Haley Ellis streamlined her body slightly as she sped toward the small patch of blue reflective water below. Less than a second later her three-story jump was broken by 39 inches of bubbling Jacuzzi water. She landed in a crouch, breaking the fall as much with the flexibility of her knees as with the water’s bubbly buoyancy.
A hand gripped her arm and pulled her toward the steps. She looked up, expecting Speers, but was instead eye-to-eye with a frightened spa-goer in soggy swim trunks. She smelled vodka on him, and was immediately aware of three other spooked residents with cocktails in their h
ands.
Now Speers hobbled toward her. His suit was dripping wet and he was holding the pack.
“Are you guys okay?” someone asked as Ellis found dry land.
A ferocious blast ripped the wall away three stories up. Ellis acted before she thought, shoving the spa-goers out of the way just before the water was deluged with scorched wood, glass and insulation.
Speers was suddenly over her, pulling Ellis up from the cement walkway. Her forearms were scraped up and bleeding, but she barely felt them.
“Get out of here,” Speers shouted at the residents as they scattered. “Call the police!”
The intelligence chief was hobbling now. Ellis grabbed the pack containing Drucker’s work and steadied Speers as they made their way toward the parking lot. Now she knew these bastards wanted Drucker’s book. She was willing to do just about anything to deprive them of it.
Speers opened the doors of his SUV and slid behind the wheel. “You are about to witness some serious psycho driving.”
He pulled into the late-night traffic, then stepped on the gas and powered past several dozen cars. He took an abrupt right turn, then navigated down an alleyway and through to the next street, where he came dangerously close to mowing down some pedestrians while merging into more traffic. It was some pretty fancy driving for a government exec.
“I didn’t expect you to jump out that window,” Ellis said.
“What was I supposed to do, die there?”
He winced as he stepped on the brake. His ankle was badly twisted, if not broken.
“You need a doctor.”
He nodded. “Later. First we need to get you somewhere safe.”
Ellis tensed at the thought of being cooped up. At least she had Drucker’s manuscript and notes to keep her busy. She couldn’t remember the last time she had read a book, but this was different. They’d have to kill her to keep her from reading this one. Lord knew they were trying.
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