Enemy Agents (17 page)

“Including Hershey,” said Quarrel.

She nodded. “I just keep hoping I didn’t kill him.” There were tears in her eyes, but Quarrel had to assume this was all a show. “I loved him,” she said.

The thought lingered in the air, and there was silence between the three of them. Thorpe was studying Fatale, Quarrel was thinking over her answers, looking for the lie, and Fatale was still playing it remorseful, as if she actually felt bad about killing people. Maybe she had real feelings for Hershey after all, and whoever she texted had taken him from her. Maybe they could use that to turn her against her handlers. The ‘maybes’ were piling up, but Quarrel still felt like she was lying. He realized he was starting to doubt and mistrust everything, just like the jaded agents he was investigating
.
That must be a good thing
,
he thought
,
since those jaded agents are still alive.

Even on the seventh floor, they heard the sound as several car doors slammed shut outside in the parking lot. The collection team was here.

“How long have you worked for Martin Mercier? Where has he been hiding all these years?” Thorpe blurted.

“I’ve been around long enough to learn a few things,” she said.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“How’s Julia?”

Thorpe backhand slapped her across the mouth. Her eyes went wild with hatred, and for a tense, silent second Thorpe and Fatale stared at each other with pure loathing, until three knocks at the door interrupted the scene. Quarrel went to let the team in.

The team was Harry’s best. Former military, guys who graduated from the Navy SEALS, Army Rangers, and Marine Force Recon into the world of top-secret clearance levels and underground HQs. There were four of them, all male, and all professionals. They showed Quarrel their ID badges and he stepped aside to let them in.

Within a minute they had replaced the knotted wire and towel with cuffs and shackles, gagged Fatale, and knocked her out with an injection. She was thrown over a team member’s shoulder, and they carried her out to one of the big black SUVs parked outside. Before they pulled away, one of them turned to Quarrel and asked if he wanted to ride back to base with them.

“Milton says you’re the point man on this,” he said.

“No I’ve got some digging to do. Milton has a list of people I’ve asked to investigate this. If any of them come to see her, let them interrogate her through glass, but nobody gets inside the room with her, nobody gives her anything. And tape everything.”

The team leader nodded. “Understood.”

He climbed into the driver’s seat, and the pair of SUVs took Fatale away.

Left alone, Quarrel turned to Thorpe. “Who’s Julia?” he asked.

Thorpe shook his head a little, his voice fading to almost silence. “Julia,” he said, “was the last person Mercier killed before he disappeared. Not that I could ever prove it.”

Thorpe shook Quarrel’s hand, apologized for not being there to save him from Fatale, and then he left as well, saying he was going to go find a drink. Thorpe hadn’t even cleaned up after himself, so Quarrel was left with the job of collecting the hidden cameras, and the laptop that they fed their video to. The only thing Thorpe had taken with him was his bar-in-a-briefcase.

#

This hotel was far too dangerous now, so he decided he needed to relocate. Quarrel transferred to a much more expensive place on Pennsylvania Avenue, tossed his suitcase on the floor, and picked up the phone. It was after midnight now, but he didn’t care about the time. He needed answers.

He called the CSIS switchboard. “I’ll need Mr. Thompson, MM28.” She asked who was calling, and Quarrel identified himself as four-zero-four-two. It was less than a minute before a groggy Thompson picked up the line.

“Thompson, it’s Quarrel.”

“Quarrel?” He paused, possibly because he didn’t remember the name straight away, or more likely to shake out the cobwebs of interrupted sleep. “What do you want? One day you were there and the next you were gone. They wouldn’t even tell me where you went.”

“I guess you could call it a field promotion. Listen, Thompson, I need you to connect me to someone far enough up the ladder that they can give me classified information.”

“Like how high? It’s not like the director takes my calls.”

“Just pick someone who you think knows where I got shipped out to, and call that person’s boss, OK? Tell them to check me out with the Americans and call me back at this number. It’s urgent.”

“OK, fine, whatever,” said Thompson through a yawn, “but don’t hold your breath.”

They hung up. It sounded like Thompson was a little put out that the junior agent he had been babysitting was now involved in something top secret, but he was a good man and he’d do as asked.

Ten minutes later, Quarrel’s cellphone rang.

“Hello?”

“Identify.”

“Four-zero-four-two. Whiskey Oscar Sierra.” The spoken ident number would be matched to a sample of Quarrel’s voice.

“This is Avril Standing, CSIS Deputy Director of field operations. I was in one of your, um, debriefings not long ago.” Quarrel remembered her. A short, thick woman with glasses. She had been one of the people who saw Quarrel’s survival as suspicious. She had likely blamed him for the bombing.

“Yes, ma’am. I remember.”

“You called up one of our men in the middle of the night and demanded some attention. So here it is. What do you want?”

“You know the nature of my assignment with the Americans?”

“I know enough.”

“Before the bombing, there was a book cipher. A copy of Jekyll and Hyde. You remember that from my debrief?”

“Yes.”

“I need both the book and the message that we were going to decode. It had to have come from one of our contacts outside the office, so somewhere in the CSIS world there is still a record of that sequence of numbers. Not to mention that I need to know who was sending the message and who was reading it. If I can decode that message, I can find your bomber.”

“How’s that?” she sounded irritated.

“Because I just had a chitchatwith another survivor. Erica Gibbons. She’s playing for the other team now, and always had been. She’s a known assassin called Fatale. I didn’t understand why they would blow up the building but I get it now. They weren’t blowing up the office to kill th
e
peopl
e
. They were trying to destroy th
e
boo
k
. Erica must have reported that I was scanning it into the servers, so the only way to suppress the book—”

“—Would be to blow up the whole thing. Kill the servers, burn the book, and anyone who might have read the message, all in one fell swoop.”

“So can you get me that message?’

“Believe it or not, Mr. Quarrel, but CSIS does its job even when you aren’t here to leak intelligence to random agents you meet in the hallway. We’ve got the number sequence in the office and we’ve compared it to every printing of Jekyll and Hyde we could find. So far, it’s not working. A jumbled mess of words with no meaning behind them. If you want the number sequence I can arrange that, but you’ll have to find that rare printing all on your own.”

“Send the sequence to this phone. It’s secure. Nobody will see it but me.”

She sighed. “Yes, OK. After all, the people who might want to kill you would probably know these numbers already.” She was gone for over a minute, and then Quarrel’s phone vibrated as the email came in. Ms. Standing came back on the line. “One more thing, Mr. Quarrel. We also know the source of the message, but not its intended reader.”

“Who sent it?”

“A former KGB agent turned Russian oil tycoon. Vladimir Plunov. He was killed the day the last message was sent, and no more transmissions were intercepted, so he was likely the only person on the other end who knew the cipher. We didn’t know at the time that Plunov was the target of an American assassin. I believe you are already familiar with Mr. Crowe.”

“So if Plunov’s dead, I guess your source has dried up,” Quarrel said with a sigh.

“Actually, no. Someone else took over posting for a little while. They sent more numbers through a website—”

“Which you’ll give me,” he said.

“Fine. It’s a bird watching website. Sometimes someone uploads a picture of a dodo bird, and the number sequence is the file name on the picture.”

“Isn’t the dodo extinct?”

“Exactly. Makes it easy to tell communiques from random posts.”

“Yeah. Yeah I get the idea.” Quarrel said, “And Ms. Standing, I have a question for you: Is Pete Hershey dead?”

She stuttered. “Why do you ask?”

“Because the woman who blew up my office seemed to think he was alive.”

“There were no remains, but that close to a bomb there wouldn’t be. The only account of his death wa
s
your
s
, Mr. Quarrel. You testified that he was killed, and we have no evidence to dispute that. Now if you’re done, I’d like to go back to bed.”

They traded emotionless goodbyes and hung up.

The number sequence had been sent by the same man Matthew Crowe had been impersonating, on the same day that he died. And Harry had insisted that Crowe didn’t kill Plunov. It had been his second-in-command. Another Russian, what was his name? Quarrel pulled the file for his luggage and found the name: Maslov. Alex Maslov. So was this guy, Maslov, a friend, because he killed Plunov, or an enemy because he was mixed up with Crowe’s death? It was a moot point now, since Maslov was dead.

Quarrel stared at his phone’s screen, reading over the series of numerals. Ten minutes ago, this number code was a loose end. A detail that Quarrel couldn’t tie to anything else.

Now it was the one piece of evidence that tied the case together. Quarrel’s office had this information before it blew up. That connected the office bombing directly to Crowe’s murder. There was no doubt now that this was all the work of the same mole, the same group plotting something around the world.
Digamma.

Quarrel set about memorizing the entire sequence. He set the numbers to a musical tune inside his head; a mnemonic that would help him remember the sequence later. Behind that thought was another, one which he repeated over and over just as often as the mnemonic
:
I have to find that book
.

21

Helping to save Quarrel’s life had been a revelation for Jessica Swift. She hadn’t been able to actually jump in and help him fight her off, but staying at a distance, using the laser to save Quarrel, Jessica had actually contributed to a physical fight in a way she hadn’t thought possible before. She had hurt someone, when it needed to be done, and even though it made her nauseous, she knew that it had been the right thing. It also helped her realize that there were other things that needed to be done, and she wanted to do them as soon as possible, before she lost her nerve.

She slipped away from Thorpe and Quarrel, back to her own hideaway inside a stolen van which she parked in a forest before she slept. She spent the next day getting in touch with a few of her contacts—there weren’t many friends left but luckily the ones she still counted on lived on the eastern seaboard—and gathered the supplies she needed. She put together a new utility belt—the old one was in Europe—and loaded it with ropes, tools, a tranquilizer dart gun, spare darts, and two small pellets of gas that would induce unconsciousness within three seconds. She also treated a cloth with a chemical to neutralize the gas, sewed it into the inside of a painter’s mask, and folded it into one of the belt’s many pockets. She also went to one of her old dead drops—a loose brick in the basement of a D.C. church—and collected her favourite watch and a couple of hair pins.

By the time she had assembled all the gear and prepared as well as she could, the sun was going down and it was time for her to make a move.

She didn’t know the building’s layout, or its security systems, but assumed the worst. She was most likely going to be caught before she got where she needed to be, but the risk was worth it. She needed to locate Jupiter, and there was no time to waste.

To the outside world, the bank in Virginia had been closed for hours. Of course, underneath that bank there was a facility that never closed. She was going to break in.

During her first trip to CIB, Swift had studied the environment, looking to see how safe it was. Or, as a professional infiltrator might look at things, to see how vulnerable it was.

The elevator room from the bank seemed to be the only access, but that was a lie. There was no way a place like CIB didn’t have at least one emergency exit, and given the depth below ground, they also needed to pump in fresh air.

Down one of the many corridors she had detected the sound of a large fan. Her well-honed sense of direction told her when she heard it that she was about twenty metres north of the elevator, and that the fan was around thirty metres west of her current location.

Now, only a day and a half later, she walked there on the ground level. It was another building, across the street from the bank: a fast-food restaurant. Dressed all in black, hair pulled back, face painted black, she climbed to the roof of the burger joint and headed for the peak. There were a few basic chimney pipes like any building, but there was also something else. A section of the roof that looked like shingles but wasn’t. It was a fabric covering dyed to look just like the shingles. She wouldn’t have noticed it if not for the small but noticeable suction coming from that patch of roof.

Cutting through the fabric, she found a four-foot-square air duct heading straight down, through the restaurant, below ground level, and into darkness. She pulled out her rope.

The fan was only disabled for about ten seconds while she climbed between the blades. Nobody in CIB would notice.

Once she was past the fan, CIB belonged to Swift. It was a network of tunnels, bending and turning, and very few wide-open spaces because open spaces underground needed a lot of support to keep from caving in. That meant that CIB was sprawling, confusing, and unusual. The air vents were just as tangled as the rest of the facility, which was both good and bad. Swift could get just about anywhere because they needed breathable air pumped into every room, but it took a while to figure out where she was going. Finally, she started to follow the cold.

The server room was chilled to keep the computers from overheating, which meant that it would be the coldest room in CIB. Once she found it, the real challenge began. The ducts went to vents in the ceiling of the server room, but the vent covers were too small for a body to fit through, and there was no way to open them. The ceiling itself seemed to be one huge metal grate, designed to stop anyone who might be inside the ducts.

And then there were the lasers. A spray of aerosol revealed a network of criss-crossing green lines. The lasers ran in perfectly horizontal lines, spaced only about two inches apart, in four places. They divided the room up like a tic-tac-toe game, with the access console at the center square. You wouldn’t be able to slide out a screen or keyboard to access information while the laser system was on, which meant that Swift would have to shut the lasers down.

There was a usable air vent in the hallway outside the server room. Before exiting the vent, she wanted to make sure the coast was clear. Snaking a fibre-optic camera out of the vent, she spotted a security camera pointed at the server room door. There were no other visible cameras in the area. She climbed out of the vent.

Quickly analyzing the camera’s shot of the door, she created a solution. The security camera was three feet left of the door, and it’s shot would only show the door and the security console in the wall next to the door. Jessica stood in the same spot—but to the right of the door instead of the left—and took a small gadget from her bag.

It was a still camera, of sorts, and by jumping into the air she took a still of the door from an angle that was very similar to the one the security camera was seeing. Of course, it was from the wrong side, a mirror image. With a swipe of her finger on the touchscreen, she flipped the image. Now it looked like she had taken a photo from the left of the door. But in this one, the security panel was on the wrong side of the door. She drew a square around the panel and another around the empty spot on the wall on the other side of the door. The image automatically swapped the two squares, placing the console back where it belonged. It was a decent-enough duplicate of what the security camera was seeing. Another button made the gadget spit out a high-res print of the photo, which Jessica snapped into a flexible plastic frame.

Shooting a small magnet at the side of camera made the image fuzzy—the same trick she had used when breaking Saleb out of custody. While the camera was down, she ran at it, jumped, and hooked the frame in front of the lens. When the camera stopped malfunctioning it was aimed at a photo that showed the server room door, rather than at the actual door. Now she could open it. But that would require a retinal scan, and she didn’t have the right eyes.

Back inside the vent, she searched around until she found someone who would have access to the servers. He was a lanky, t-shirt-wearing techie fiddling with the inside of a computer tower at the side of one of the offices. She had never met him, but Swift assumed that this was their in-house computer guru, codenamed Kilo. Now, she needed to get him alone so she could use his eye.

Gently tapping a screwdriver on the side of the duct got his attention. He looked around, confused, and eventually looked up at the duct over the office. Swift had him on the hook, and now it was time to reel him in. Retreating to the vent over the corridor, she tapped again, urging him to follow.

He came out into the hallway, looked up again, but instead of following her back to the server room he jogged away. Swift retreated to the vent above the server room door. Maybe he would go get a guard and try to investigate. She could handle that. At least, she hoped so.

Kilo did what she had hoped for, but not like Swift had wanted. When Kilo came jogging back toward the server room door, he didn’t bring a guard, but Samantha Boswell. The most lethal agent in CIB.

“If anyone’s inside the walls, this would be what they’re after,” he said to Boswell.

“Sure. Now that that Quarrel kid blew the mole, they have to break in to steal secrets.”

Swift rolled her screwdriver to the grate over the server room. It just barely squeezed between the metal bars and fell eight feet to the floor below. When it hit the concrete, it was loud.

“They’re already inside,” said Kilo nervously.

“Open it,” demanded Boswell. Kilo typed a code into the security console, then leaned in to let it scan his eye. The door clicked and opened.

That’s when Swift shot Boswell in the neck with a tranq dart. Boswell started to curse, and collapsed. Kilo made a quiet yelp, but shut up when Swift opened the vent and dropped to the floor, Boswell’s body between them. She saw his eyes flicker to the security camera, and when he noticed the plastic frame blocking the lens his shoulders slumped.

“Epic fail,” was all he said before Swift shot a dart into his chest.

She took the time to dissemble Boswell’s sidearm before she went into the chilly server room. Once she was inside the door closed automatically to keep the cold inside. She used the security console to lock the door. She should have dragged the unconscious bodies inside—any passerby could see them—but this room was a meat locker and they’d be unconscious for at least a half hour. Leaving them here would possibly kill them.

There was another security camera in here. They might be watching her, right now. But there was nothing to do about that now. She’d get the file and the file would prove she was innocent. Even if they came to bust her now, she’d have the proof on Jupiter before she was arrested. It would only take a little cyber-sleuthing.

There were firewalls; they didn’t last long. The computer requested passwords; she got through without them. Even if “Jupiter” was just a computer program, she could still find out who it was that wanted Saleb’s file destroyed. All she needed to do was find out who had accessed the Jupiter program on that day, and she’d have the traitor. It took a while to look through everything, because she really didn’t know what a Jupiter-type program would look like, but eventually she found it: a list of login codes and timestamps.

She popped a thumb drive into a USB port and copied the file to her own drive.

She had it.

“On your knees, bitch.”The voice was like ice on the back of her neck. Samantha Boswell was standing behind her, holding a Glock, aiming for Swift’s head. She felt Boswell jerk the dart gun out of her belt and toss it back through the closing server room door, before stepping back to a safer distance. “I mean ‘on your knees
,
right no
w
.’ ”

Boswell had somehow resisted a powerful tranquilizer. This was not good.

The file finished copying. She didn’t move to reach for it, but she was about to. Boswell spoke again. “I just put this gun back together and trust me, i
t
wil
l
fire.”

Swift let out a ragged breath and her stomach dropped. Boswell had her. She slowly got down on her knees.

“How the hell did you break in?” Boswell demanded.

“It’s a secret.” Swift put her hands atop her head without being asked.

Boswell kept her distance. “What the hell are you doing in here? Stealing more information to give to your terrorist buddies?”

“I really need this information.”

“You’re helping Saleb. You broke him free. Because I sure as hell didn’t.”

“Listen to me, Boswell. You’re a good agent so just trust me on this. I need that file.”

Boswell’s gun was still aimed at Swift’s head. “Tell me where Saleb is and you get to leave this room alive.”

“Saleb isn’t a traitor. He was set up and that file can prove it.”

“If we had that kind of info on file, don’t you think someone would have noticed?”

“I’m asking you to help me—”

“Did you know I’ve never missed when I pulled the trigger? At this range you’d have a closed casket.”

Swift realized that this tactic wasn’t working. There was no reasoning with Samantha Boswell. There was no give. Boswell was too jaded, too untrusting, or potentially even worse: Boswell could be the Jupiter who had sent her to destroy Saleb’s file. Either way, Swift was out of options. She needed to escape this room and get back to Saleb. Back to Europe. Back to her own mission to find the mole. She needed a way past Sam Boswell. And the file she’d read at the briefing made it sound like nobody in history had ever gotten past Boswell.

But Jessica Swift was no slouch, either. She hadn’t planned a perfect infiltration of America’s sixth-best-defended structure without a Plan C. Placing her hands on her head had been the first step. A tiny RFID tag in one of her hairpins had sent a signal once it was within two inches of her watch. As long as that signal was on, the watch was counting down. And that had been not-quite-exactly one minute ago. She shifted her weight, a whole-body movement that masked the imperceptible shift of her wrist to angle the watch face at Boswell.

“You have three seconds,” said Boswell, “before I—”

Swift’s watch fired two hundred small beams of light into Boswell’s eyes. The instant she saw the “blinder” strike Boswell’s face, Swift dove to the left, rolling around the server tower. Boswell screamed, her eyes temporarily blinded. She squeezed the trigger at the spot where she expected Swift to be, and the bullets passed within inches of the rolling intruder.