Agent Out

by Francine Pascal

  What?

  Will forced his face not to move, but it was very difficult. He knew Winston Marsh—Gaia’s traveling companion—was a decorated FBI agent or had been at one time. Why would Malloy be calling him an “international criminal”?

  “Moore has been on the move for more than thirty-six hours,” Malloy went on, “during which time she’s used her credentials to engage in a completely fraudulent and unauthorized ‘investigation,’ not to mention conducting not one but two clandestine IRC chat conversations with somebody on this base. Dr. Wolfson here is absolutely sure of it.”

  “We’ve got the interrogation tapes of the gas station employees,” one of the technicians announced. “They definitely saw her; the description matches the Starbucks surveillance video image. Downloading from the satellite feed in forty seconds. And we’re getting closer to trapping that cell phone call—she apparently contacted someone in the computer department here at Quantico.”

  “I think it’s you, Taylor,” Malloy went on. “I think you’re the one she’s chatting with. I think you know where she is and what she’s doing.”

  Will stared back at Malloy. It was torture to have to think so fast while maintaining a totally blank face, but he forced himself to do it.

  I should agree right now, he thought. Tell him where she is, and then they can come in and save the day. Helicopters, jets, National Guard—whatever it takes. Gaia had successfully tied Catherine’s disappearance to a Socorro operative, Will reminded himself. No matter how stubborn she was being, it was time for the bureau to take over—he had been insisting this to her all along.

  “You have no idea how important this is,” Kinney said stiffly, his jaw muscles flexing the edges of the bandage he wore. “It is absolutely imperative that we locate Moore as soon as possible, especially now that Marsh is out of the picture.”

  Out of the picture? Will found that phrase disturbing. Is that what you say after a successful gray op? Is Gaia going to be “out of the picture” soon?

  “Well, Taylor?” Malloy said, stepping closer. His chiseled, weather-beaten face was very close to Will’s. “What have you been chatting with her about? We are facing a ticking clock and an extremely serious threat to national security. I am ordering you to tell me where Gaia is and what she’s doing.”

  She’s in Collingswood, Will thought helplessly. She’s in a motel. She fell asleep about twenty minutes ago and when she wakes up, she’s going to drive to Philadelphia and go to the corner of Decatur and Main, to a specific spot in the city water grid, and wait for Socorro to show up and do whatever they’re going to do.

  The entire answer, as a series of clear, complete sentences, was on the tip of Will’s tongue. With no effort at all, he could open his mouth and tell them everything.

  Do it! a very sensible voice in Wills head was raging at him. Tell them where she is! Get us all out of this nightmare! This is the cavalry. These are the good guys. Tell them all and let them help.

  But as much as he wanted to, he couldn’t quite make himself speak.

  What if she’s right? he thought suddenly. What if they’re launching a gray op from this room right now? What do I say to Gaia when she’s dead? “Sorry, ma’am, but I didn’t believe you, and anyway, I was worried about my own career?”

  “Sir, what’s a ‘gray operation? Or ‘gray op’ for short?”

  “Taylor!” Malloy snapped, so loudly that the technicians in the room turned around. “I want you to answer my question.”

  Will looked over at Kinney. He had just realized something.

  “She did that, didn’t she?” Will asked, pointing at Kinney’s neck. “Gaia fought you. Looks like she won, too.”

  Kinney glared at Will. For a moment Will thought that the older man might actually take a swing at him before he visibly mastered his temper.

  “There’s no such thing as a ‘gray operation,’” Kinney said.

  And you, Will thought, looking at Kinney, haven’t said one word yet that I believe.

  “I haven’t had any communication with Gaia, sir,” Will said. His mind was made up—and the lying was easier now that he was sure of the position he was taking.

  Kinney turned away disgustedly. “Oh, for—”

  “All right,” Malloy said, sighing heavily. “You may have just destroyed your FBI career for good. I want you to think about that very carefully over the next few hours, and if you decide to come to your senses, I want you to contact me. You’ve got to live with the decisions you make. Remember that, Taylor.”

  “Yes, sir,” Will said, nodding gravely. “I will.”

  “Good. Now get the hell out of here,” Malloy snapped, turning away.

  HARBORED SUSPICIONS

  Will was still breathing hard as he knocked on the double doors to the tech lab. He had run all the way across the Quantico base, from the admin building over here to the science building, in the hope that he would catch Lyle in his office. Lyle’s desk phone had rung ten times with no answer, followed by Lyle’s terse message (“Its Lyle; you know what to do”), then a beep. But Will figured he might be right there. Will and Gaia had spent a fair amount of time with the shy, reserved technician, and Will had seen him ignore his ringing phone many times.

  Approaching the science building, his lungs burning for air, he felt a bit better as he looked up at the building’s gleaming glass facade, looming against the bright Virginia sky, and saw the fluorescent lights glowing in Lyle’s window—and could just make out the top of Lyle’s head, barely visible behind a stack of books.

  Thank God for small favors, he thought, racing up the stairs to the fifth floor.

  “Go away,” Lyle yelled out from within the lab as Will knocked again. “Access denied.”

  “Lyle, it’s Will Taylor,” Will called out.

  “So?”

  “So I need your help,” Will said. And then, hating himself for doing it but doing it anyway, he added, “Gaia needs your help, too.” He’d always harbored suspicions that Lyle had a little bit of a crush on Gaia, and he hated to exploit that knowledge, but he couldn’t think of anything else to do.

  And Gaia’s on her way to Philadelphia, he thought for what must have been the fiftieth time. And nobody knows what she’s going to find. And nobody can stop her.

  “Uh-huh,” Lyle called out. “Listen, I’m really busy—”

  “Damn it, Lyle, will you let me in?” Will shouted. ‘I’m not kidding! This is serious!”

  After an agonizingly long pause, the double doors clicked open. Lyle was standing there, his curly hair backlit by the fluorescent lights, his glasses reflecting Will’s anxious face. He was wearing a brown, short-sleeve button-down shirt and holding a complex-looking computer board in one hand.

  “What’s so important? Hey—!”

  Will had pushed past Lyle, bodily propelling himself into the tech lab.

  “Look,” Will began, still out of breath. Lyle was looking in alarm at Will’s disheveled appearance. “I don’t have time to explain, but I need your help. I need information that’s on the admin building network—and you can get it for me.”

  Lyle frowned. “Don’t you have a pass to that building?”

  “Yes, but not to get into the secure terrorism network,” Will explained impatiently, “and I don’t have a password that will log me on because I’m not clearance level 4.”

  Lyle had moved to his cluttered desk and slowly sat back down. Will moved toward him, not wanting to appear physically threatening but realizing he was giving that impression nonetheless. “I’m clearance level 4,” Lyle remarked conversationally. “But I can’t—”

  “Yes, you can,” Will repeated urgently. “Come with me right now over to admin. Say you’ve got to, you know, repair the servers or something. Then we can go downstairs and get into the main terrorism datab—”

  “No.” Lyle vigorously shook his head. “Forget it. No more. I don’t care if Gaia Moore wants that information. I don’t care if Christina Aguilera and Britney Spear
s want it. You can’t have it. I refuse to bend the rules.”

  Will narrowed his eyes. He was listening to Lyle, but at the same time he had just noticed something. Partially buried amid the disorganized piles of bric-a-brac on Lyle’s desk, he could see two spare magnetic pass cards. They looked like featureless, off-white credit cards that happened to be a quarter inch thick.

  He’s got a few of them, Will realized. He must go through them like Kleenex—constantly moving around the base and dealing with all those locked-up computers.

  “Okay,” Will said, taking a step backward and exhaling loudly. “Okay, Lyle, I’m sorry. I truly am—I’m just in this crazy situation where Gaia’s asking me to do something and I’m going crazy trying to comply.” He faked a weak smile.

  “Sorry, man,” Lyle said reluctantly. “I just can’t do it. I’d lose my job and worse.”

  “Sure,” Will said, squinting critically. “Actually, that’s the other thing I wanted to talk to you about.”

  “What?”

  “If you go look at the base phone records,” Will confided, “just between you and me, you’ll see logs from very early yesterday morning when you had your little conversation with Gaia.”

  The moment he saw Lyle’s face, Will knew he’d guessed right.

  “I didn’t—”

  “Yeah, but you did,” Will went on mercilessly, “and more people know about it than you realize. In fact, I happen to know that Dr. Wolfson is trying to trace the call’s origin. If I were you, I’d start making sure he doesn’t succeed.”

  “Wolfson? Oh, hell,” Lyle said anxiously, and turned to his computer, which was displaying a Jennifer Garner screen saver.

  The moment his back was turned, Will started sliding his hand on Lyle’s desk, reaching for one of the spare pass cards.

  “I knew I should have just hung up,” Lyle said, typing his password. He didn’t seem to notice that behind him, Will was standing on his toes and staring avidly at Lyle’s fingers as he logged on. “I don’t know how I let her talk me into that.”

  Four characters, Will noticed. A—I—A—

  He couldn’t read the fourth one.

  But one of the two spare pass cards was in his pants pockets.

  “Thanks,” Lyle sang out, peering at what looked like a security readout screen. “That was a close one.”

  “No problem,” Will said. Now his only priority was to get out of the room before Lyle noticed that one of his spare cards was missing. “Sorry about coming down so hard. That lady’s just difficult to refuse.”

  Lyle smiled weakly. “I understand,” he said. “No hard feelings.”

  None at all, Will thought as he turned to leave. None at all, my friend.

  A RULE THAT TRAINEES ALMOST NEVER BROKE

  With his back pressed against the basement wall, trying to sneak past a motion sensor, Will found himself thinking about his uncle Casper.

  In his mind, Will was sitting with his uncle on Casper’s back porch, the way they always did in the spring, looking out over the rolling fields behind the house, and Will was trying to convince Casper he wasn’t stupid.

  But you are stupid, Casper was saying. You remember that movie? “Stupid is as stupid does”? That’s you all over, Willy, because you re risking everything on a gamble. And where our people come from, a man doesn’t do that.

  Standing flat against the wall of the Quantico administration building’s basement, imagining this conversation, Will had to admit that Uncle Casper had a point.

  It was five ten in the afternoon, and above him the Quantico administration building was humming with activity. But down here it was a different world. As the warning sign on the glass door made clear, the entire basement (and its millions of dollars’ worth of seismic security protection) closed down at 1700 hours—5 p.m., or ten minutes ago.

  And Will Taylor—star athlete, model student—FBI investigator, was breaking a rule that trainees almost never broke. The main deterrent was something far more effective than locks and combination codes. It was the consequences. There was a no-tolerance policy for trainees who violated security guidelines. If they were caught once, they were thrown out—and usually court-marshaled.

  And that part’s going to be especially fun, Will thought ruefully as he took another step to his left, with his eye fixed on the rotating ruby red LED in the ceiling that indicated the motion detector’s cycle. Just another eighteen inches and he was home free. I’m especially going to like sitting up there in front of a military court and explaining how I tried to sneak into the national security database network and actually had a fantasy that I could get away with it.

  Twenty minutes before, he had swiped his laminated active duty pass in the card reader, watched the red light turn green and the door open, and then strode up to the security desk and waved cheerfully at the uniformed marine guard.

  “Afternoon, Burt—how goes it?” Will said as he signed in, writing his destination as Township Law Enforcement—4th Floor.

  “Going to be a warm night,” Burt pointed out.

  “Yep. Have a good one, Burt,” Will called out as he strode away toward the elevators, his shoes clicking on the stone floor.

  This time of day, only a few FBI employees were scattered around the lobby. Nobody was paying attention to Will.

  Here goes.

  The elevator button bonged as he pressed it. While the elevator was on its way, Will reversed his direction and began walking as quietly as he could toward the black steel door that led to the basement stairwell.

  While the elevator door was rolling open behind him, Will used the sound as cover while he swiped Lyle’s stolen pass card. There was a frightening pause while nothing happened, and then on his second try the door flew open. Will slipped through it as fast as he could. The stairwell door was an official fire exit, Will saw—it had pneumatic latches on its inside with a red sign that said EMERGENCY EXIT ONLY—PRESS HERE—ALARM WILL SOUND. Will caught the door before it could click shut and with the aid of a wooden pencil he’d brought for this purpose propped it open.

  You can see the pencil from the outside, Will thought, looking at the edge of the door. But that’s just too bad. It’s after five—I just have to hope nobody notices.

  Then Will had hurried down the stairwell and into the basement corridor, and here he was, playing the game of moving four inches to the wall every time he saw that the ceiling motion detector had cycled away from him.

  Finally all this slow, careful work paid off, and now he was able to slip around the corner and into a secure computer annex down the hall from the main complex. It was a small room with two computer terminals against opposite walls.

  Approaching the leftmost terminal and turning it on, Will was greeted with a forbidding looking log-in screen with a blue FBI seal and boldface type reading ADMINISTRATIVE SPECIAL CLEARANCE WORKSTATION and, below that, UNAUTHORIZED USE OF THIS FACILITY IS A FEDERAL CRIME.

  Never mind, Will thought, typing Lyle Perkins into the screen’s log-in panel. Then he stopped.

  A-I-A—and a fourth letter, Will thought. Artificial intelligence?

  Without much hope, he typed AIAI.

  INCORRECT PASSWORD, the system responded.

  Will’s shirt was already stained with sweat. He looked at the screen, trying to think like a hacker. They always used clever patterns, word reversals, personal secrets—

  “Backward,” Will said out loud, snapping his fingers. He entered AIAG as the password. The computer responded immediately.

  PASSWORD ACCEPTED WELCOME, PERKINS, LYLE YOU ARE LOGGED IN AT LEVEL 04 SECURITY ACCESS

  Without preamble, Will logged into the terrorism database search function, typing in the word Socorro.

  And now, finally, we’ll get some answers.

  It was torture to wait the additional thirty seconds that passed before the screen refreshed:

  ERROR 512: TERM TOO GENERAL

  System contains 349,909,210 entries for your selection

  “SO
CORRO”

  Please narrow your search by selecting a cross-reference term MOST FREQUENT CROSS-REFERENCE TERMS FOR “SOCORRO”:

  Ramon Nino: 26,434 entries or capsule bio

  Explosives and Explosive Detonations: 1,030 entries

  James Rossiter aka Jimmy Rossiter: 26,434 entries

  Poisoning Incidents: 9 entries

  There was more, but Will fixated on the first entry: Nino.

  CAPSULE BIO

  Ramon Nino

  Age 41. H 6’2”. W 210. E Brown. H Brown. Birth San Miguel Capistrano.

  Ramon Nino is the undisputed leader of international terrorist organization 65-1, code-named “SOCORRO.” Since 1982 Nin has been charged with forty-five separate illegal activities in Latin America and the United States, including twelve indictments for murder. None of these cases have ever gone to trial except one (see below). The list of atrocities committed by Nino is long and detailed, but Nino excels at hiding his true crimes—including murder, arson, conspiracy—from his followers, except for a trusted “inner circle” of advisers. In 2002 Nino was arrested and charged with conspiracy and reckless endangerment under the Homeland Security Act and was incarcerated in federal maximum security penitentiary #23459, where he will remain until his parole hearing on 08/24/05 at the Philadelphia County Courthouse, Philadelphia, PA. Click for more information.

  August 24, Will thought.

  Tomorrow.

  El Dia.

  Will could hear his pulse thumping in his ears. He clicked back a page and clicked on the link for Socorro cross-referenced with James Rossiter.

  What was that?

  For the second time Will was absolutely convinced he’d heard muffled footsteps outside the computer room. As if someone was approaching the room but was doing it very slowly and quietly so as not to get caught.

  Meanwhile there was a pause while the computer retrieved the data, and then another summary page came up: