Laynie Portland, Spy Resurrected

by Vikki Kestell

  Yes, Lord, she spoke within her heart. Knowing you is the surpassing worth of my life—I see that now. I would willingly lose everything . . . as long as I never lose you.

  She began to drift again. My system is still flooded with drugs.

  Before she sank under the weight of the drugs, she acknowledged that it would take her body hours to flush the narcotics, whatever they were, from her system. But without food and water when she next woke, would she have the strength to break free of whatever prison she found herself in?

  Moreover, would she remember how she had gotten here?

  Chapter 10

  TOBIN RODE SHOTGUN in the passenger seat beside Wolfe’s driver.

  “Quincy Tobin,” he said to the driver.

  “Tom Parker.” He glanced behind him. “Don’t mind me. I’m just the hired help.”

  “Hired help with a Top Secret security clearance,” Wolfe deadpanned without looking up.

  Tobin chuckled—amazed that the weight of grief he’d been carrying had lifted. “Nice to meet you, Parker. I’m sort of in the same boat as you. You know—don’t mind me. I’m just the hired gun.”

  Parker laughed without making a sound. “Good to know,” he said softly.

  In the rear seat, Wolfe worked the seal on the package open, unwrapped layers of packaging, and began leafing through the several sheets that comprised the package’s contents. Jaz slid close and attempted to read what he held.

  “Miss Jessup?”

  “Sir?”

  “You’re lurking. I’ll be forced to file a harassment complaint with HR if you don’t get off my shoulder.”

  “Well, I can’t see what the *bleep* you’ve got there.”

  “If you’ll allow me to scan through and get a sense of what it is, I can then offer you half of the intel while I read the rest.”

  In the front seat, Tobin and Parker slid glances at each other. Parker’s eyes had gone wide at Jaz’s less-than-deferential behavior.

  Tobin was amused.

  “She’s an acquired taste,” he said—loud enough for the backseat to hear.

  Wolfe snort-laughed under his breath. Like Tobin, the relief coursing through his blood was better than knocking back a couple of stiff drinks. He was euphoric.

  Jaz was not. “You think this is a joke, Tobin?”

  She rounded on Wolfe. “And do you? You’re all fired up just because the body they shipped to us isn’t Bella’s, so just like that, you’ve moved on to stopping a terror attack? Do you think an impending attack is why I want to see what’s in the package? Do I have to remind you and Tobin that Bella’s still missing? That burned body doesn’t prove she isn’t dead. It only proves that body isn’t her. So where is she?”

  When neither Wolfe nor Tobin responded, she sat back, folded her arms, and huffed.

  Wolfe leaned toward her. “I’m sorry. Sorry that I can’t do anything to find Bella while we’re on the road. What I can do is analyze the intelligence Cossack risked his cover and life to pass to us. Sorry if that makes you think I don’t care about finding her, because I surely do.”

  “Careful. I’ll have to file a harassment complaint if you don’t clear outta my *bleeping* personal space, Director.”

  Parker sort of choked.

  Tobin whispered to Parker out of one side of his mouth, “Like I said. An acquired taste.”

  THEY HADN’T GONE FAR when Wolfe suggested they stop for lunch—not for fast food but for an actual sit-down meal. None of them had eaten since breakfast. When Tobin gave his hearty assent, Wolfe pointed Parker to an upcoming restaurant. Parker maneuvered into the right lane and turned into the parking lot.

  “Nope. No, this won’t work,” Jaz objected. “Drive on, Parker.”

  “You don’t pay my driver, Miss Jessup. Kindly refrain from giving him orders,” Wolfe reminded her. “This restaurant is fine.”

  “Does it offer complementary broadband service?”

  “I sincerely doubt it.”

  “Then it’s a no-go. Also? It’s too snooty for my needs.”

  “Your needs?”

  “Yah. I require space to unpack my laptop and spread out. Means I won’t be sharing a table with you three. Need my own workspace—and any ‘lah-dee-dah’ restaurant you choose will look down their noses at me. Draw unwanted attention.”

  Parker, who was driving aimlessly around the parking lot, glanced in the rearview mirror for Wolfe’s instructions.

  Wolfe heaved a sigh. “Drive on, Parker.”

  They exited to the main road, and within fifteen minutes, Jaz vetoed Wolfe’s next choice for lunch. And the next. And the one after that.

  “Director, if you’d let me pick, we could avoid this stalemate,” Jaz told him.

  Wolfe sought Tobin’s attention. “Marshal?”

  Tobin just lifted one shoulder.

  “Fine,” Wolfe ground out.

  Five possible eateries later, a disgruntled Wolfe found himself sharing a corner booth with Parker and Tobin. Jaz, occupying her own table across the aisle, ignored them and set to work. Wolfe was not pleased with Jaz’s choice. They were in a common, second-rate café attached to a third-rate hotel. All because said hotel’s blinking sign boasted free broadband service in their rooms and café.

  “I’m unaccustomed to dining where the tables are topped in cheap laminate and come standard with ketchup and mustard dispensers, Miss Jessup.”

  Jaz had plugged her laptop’s cable into the café’s service, and was watching the computer boot.

  “Sorry, but I need to check the status of the ‘traps’ I’ve set to snare our mole. For that I need broadband service and space to work.” She speared him with an arch look bordering on disdain. “You do want me to find the mole, right, Wolfey?”

  Parker flinched, wagged his head slowly back and forth, and mouthed “Wolfey?”

  Tobin, beginning to enjoy himself, just grinned.

  Wolfe turned to Tobin. “I’m not paying you people enough to work with her, Marshal.”

  “She’s usually not quite this bad, but I was going to ask about hazard pay. You know—what with the car bomb, almost losing a kidney, the Ukrainian mob assassination attempt, being forcibly uprooted from my home twice now, and so on.”

  “What?” Parker’s level of “stunned” clicked up a notch.

  “Parker’s not ‘read into’ the task force’s day-to-day activities, Marshal Tobin.”

  “All due respect, sir? Please don’t change the subject. We were talking hazard pay.”

  “Noted.” And ignored. Wolfe opened his menu and scanned through it. “Unbelievable. Eight kinds of greasy burgers, three versions of oily fries, and ten flavors of sugary soft drinks—and that’s just lunch. Positively barbaric.”

  “Better than what Bella’s been eating, I wager,” Jaz growled across the aisle.

  Wolfe reddened. “Point taken. And thank you for the reminder, Miss Jessup.”

  Jaz returned her eyes to her screen. “Order me a chef’s salad, ranch on the side, and iced tea when the waitress comes,” she said. “No telling what’s in that mystery meat they serve as hamburger.” She pecked furiously on the laptop’s keyboard, oblivious to anything else, while the men ordered.

  When the food came, Jaz picked up her fork and took a bite, her focus still on her screen. The men had taken six bites to her one when they heard her fork clatter on the floor. Her eyes were glued to the screen while she typed furiously.

  When Jaz didn’t seem to notice she’d dropped her fork, Tobin asked, “Jaz? Everything all—”

  “Got you. Got you, you slimy, stinking weasel!”

  Wolfe and Tobin slid from the booth. They pulled empty chairs to Jaz’s table. Sat on either side of her.

  “What do you have, Miss Jessup?” Wolfe asked, keeping his voice low.

  “I have the task force’s mole, sir.”

  “Who? Who is it?” Tobin demanded.

  Wolfe pulled his flip phone, “I’ll call Broadsword. Richard will have him or her i
n custody before we leave this sorry excuse of a restaurant.”

  Jaz was still reading when her face fell. “It . . . it’s not going to be as simple as that, I’m afraid.”

  She opened a new file and began copying and pasting into it, toggling to another screen and back, faster than Tobin or Wolfe could follow, ignoring their whispered demands for more information. Then she yanked the power and broadband cables and grabbed her laptop and its case without shutting the laptop down. “I took screen grabs of what you need to read, and the battery will keep my laptop going for a couple of hours—but we need to go. Now.”

  Wolfe dropped a wad of cash on Jaz’ table. They left their food and ran for the car.

  “Parker,” Wolfe ordered, “Push the speed limit.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Tobin had crowded into the back seat, sandwiching Jaz between him and Wolfe. Jaz pushed her laptop away until it perched on her knees so that Tobin and Wolfe could view the screen while she explained what she’d uncovered.

  “I’ve been monitoring every phone at Broadsword, hoping to catch the mole texting, calling out, or receiving a call, but it occurred to me that the mole would likely have a second phone, one I know nothing about.”

  “A burner,” Tobin supplied.

  “Yah.” She unwrapped a stick of gum, folded it, and shoved it into her mouth. “But, the thing is, Broadsword is in range of only one cell tower. Just one tower provides cell service up that mountain, you know.”

  “I do know. You have no idea how much we paid to have the provider build that tower so far off the beaten path,” Wolfe murmured.

  “Figures. Cell service is as necessary as Internet is these days. Richard told me Broadsword had high-speed DSL. That had to have set you back ten, fifteen grand or more, so why not your own, private cell tower?”

  “Get on with it, Miss Jessup.”

  She shrugged, twirling a half-empty pack of gum in her left hand while gesturing with her right. “I wrote a program to monitor any and all cell activity pinging off that tower. Once I ruled out the mobile phones at Broadsword—the ones I knew about—I customized the program’s code to ignore them.”

  “Ignore them?”

  “Just the pings to the tower. I track the communications of all our phones in another program.”

  She pointed to her screen. “Turns out Broadsword has a couple of distant ‘neighbors’—houses not actually near Broadsword land, but close enough to the cell tower to piggyback their cell service off of it. Not entirely your own private cell tower after all, Director. Anyway, I had to identify and rule out the neighbors’ phones, too.”

  Her jaws moved like pistons between sentences. “This morning a new phone pinged the tower. New to me, that is. That’s what my program was checking for—previously unidentified pings. When we sat down in the restaurant, I saw the new phone. Then I hacked into its service provider and read the text message records.”

  She toggled to an open file. “I’ve pasted the screen caps of the most recent texts in chronological order, earliest to latest.” She pointed. “Here. Read.”

  Tobin and Wolfe leaned closer. Noted the timestamp. Thursday, 2:16 p.m.

  Unusual activity.

  Two TF members

  left grounds without

  permission

  Uproar over unauth

  departure

  “That was two days ago,” Jaz reminded them.

  “That’s our task force mole?”

  “Undoubtedly.”

  A reply text followed.

  Who? Find out

  where they have gone

  “Who’s replying to our mole, Jaz?”

  “Has to be your other mole, Director. The ‘bigshot’ mole in your staff.”

  “Can you trace the phone to my, er, bigshot mole? Identify him?”

  “Not yet. His phone pinged off several cell towers in DC, which doesn’t help us or tell us anything we hadn’t presumed. When we’re back to Broadsword, I’ll build the code I need to ‘snare’ him.”

  Jaz sighed. “Getting back to the task force’s mole? Continue reading. You need to see this.”

  The mole at Broadsword texted again.

  Want proof of life

  Tobin and Wolfe sucked in their breath at the same time.

  “I told you it wasn’t going to be simple,” Jaz said softly.

  Check email

  “Email? You assured me you were monitoring everyone’s email,” Wolfe growled.

  “Yah, well I’m not omniscient. Once I deduced who the mole was, I went hunting and uncovered a second email account. New and well hidden—just not well enough to keep me from finding it once I knew it was out there.”

  “But you deduced the mole’s identity first?”

  “By the demand for proof of life. Keep going.”

  A grainy photo appeared on the next page of her screen shots—a frightened woman embracing a young child. The photo had a date and time stamp. 12/06/2001 2:23 p.m.

  “Our task force’s mole is a man, and he has a family,” Tobin muttered.

  Wolfe sat back. “Explains why we couldn’t understand how one of our own could be a traitor. He’s being coerced. Who is he, Jaz?”

  She slid a stick of gum from the pack one-handed, not even aware she was doing it, then flipped it end over end and slid it back into the pack.

  “See, I have the personnel profiles of our task force members on my hard drive. None of us are married or have kids. That leaves exactly two possibilities.”

  Tobin wagged his head sadly. “Lance or Sherman.”

  Wolfe groaned. “I would trust either of those two men with my life . . . but Lance isn’t married.”

  Jaz’s sad eyes met Wolfe’s. “Yah. Our mole is Sherman—and your other mole has his wife and kid.”

  They read the screen grabs of the next text message.

  Tobin and Jessup

  no word where

  The reply followed.

  You have until dark

  or wife loses 2nd finger

  Tobin shook with rage. “They cut off one of his wife’s fingers?”

  “Settle down, Marshal. It’s the fastest way for a kidnapper to gain a mark’s cooperation. You know how this works.”

  Tobin leaned his face against the window. “Bo helped us get off Broadsword’s grounds undetected. He was the only person to know where we were going.”

  “Yah, true,” Jaz said. “And Bo must have gotten back to Broadsword before dark. Look.”

  The mole they believed to be Sherman texted at 6:49.

  New Orleans

  Garineau funeral

  “How could Sherman have found that out?” Tobin demanded. “Bo wouldn’t have ratted us out to him or anyone else!”

  Jaz answered. “Look, once the team noticed we were AWOL and that Bo’s truck was the only vehicle to leave Broadsword after lunch, they’d put two and two together fast enough. Everyone including Seraphim would realize that Bo helped us ‘escape.’ I figure Bo knew he had to come clean to Richard when he got back, including why we were going to NOLA. However, knowing we had a mole, Bo wouldn’t have said a word to Richard in the open. They would have used the conference room.”

  “That room is built like a SCIF. How could Sherman have listened in on their conversation?”

  “It’s true that the conference room is soundproof, but it’s not bug-proof. I mean, yes, Richard’s people do scan the room each morning, so that means Sherman would have bugged the conference room as soon as the other mole threatened to cut off his wife’s finger. A one-off event. And he would have removed the bug as soon as he had the information he needed.”

  “Miss Jessup, if bugging the conference room was a ‘one-off event,’ how could Sherman have overheard the details of Bella’s mission to Tbilisi?” Wolfe asked. “We discussed the operational details in the conference room and only in the conference room.”

  Jaz recalled her last conversation with Bella. The moment when Bella told her about the mission an
d asked Jaz to monitor her cell signal.

  “I’m flying to Tbilisi, Georgia, to meet Cossack. In person.”

  “What the *blank*! Why would you do that?”

  “Because the next attack is only weeks from now, Jaz, and Cossack says it will outstrip 9/11.”

  Jaz gulped over the remembered exchange. “Oh.”

  “Oh?”

  “Um, Bella and I, we walked around the house just minutes before she left. We were too far away from anyone to be overheard . . . and yet, because all the other conversations about the mission were held in the conference room, somehow we had to have been overheard.”

  She pursed her lips. “If Sherman obtained the intel from our conversation while we were outside walking the perimeter, then he must have a parabolic listening device. No telling how many times he’s used it.”

  “Well, he won’t use it again or pass further intelligence to our enemies. Like I said earlier, I will have Richard’s men take him down the moment we hit Broadsword.”

  Jaz looked up at Wolfe. “We can’t take Sherman into custody, Director.”

  “I am aware of the jeopardy it puts his family in, and it distresses me. However, our first priority is cutting off the flow of information to Sherman’s handler.”

  “That’s not what I meant when I said we can’t have Richard take Sherman into custody.”

  Tobin studied Jaz. “Selective disinformation?”

  “Absolutely. Keep reading.”

  Notify when they return

  Find out what they did

  “They don’t know what we’ve uncovered,” Tobin said. “They don’t know we know that the body we have isn’t Bella’s—or that we have uncovered the identity of the task force’s mole.”

  “Which is why we can’t tell anyone at Broadsword what we’ve figured out,” Jaz said softly. “We have to leave the task force in the dark. For now.”

  Wolfe slowly nodded. “I concur.” He thought for a long moment. “The way I see it, we have three intertwined problems. One, the impending New Year’s Eve attacks—where, when, what, and how to stop them. Two, Bella’s well-being—if she’s alive and if she can be rescued. Three, how we handle Sherman—what disinformation to construct to our advantage and how to feed it to him.”