Enemy Agents (25 page)

30

Chris Quarrel was lingering at a railing, looking down at one of the best looking rooms in Washington. The reading room in the Library of Congress, with tables proportioned to form concentric rings inside the round room, was something Quarrel hadn’t expected to be so impressed by. It was simultaneously historic and modern, busy but not crowded. It felt like a building that was important both historically an
d
right now
.
And Quarrel was waiting for the CIA to escort him to a private room to show off some documents that were definitely not housed here.

After he had been unable to call Thorpe and warn him that Fatale was tricking him, Quarrel had called the number from Hinkston’s business card. The card only listed the name “Hinkston” and a phone number, and Quarrel felt foolish that he didn’t even know the guy’s first name.

“Central Intelligence Agency,” answered a pleasant-sounding woman.

“Director Hinkston, please.”

“Authorization?”

“I don’t have one. Just tell him it’s Quarrel from Canada. Regarding a Ms. Reville.”

“Hold the line, sir.”

Quarrel waited for five minutes before the telephone clicked repeatedly. Quarrel was still standing in the kitchen of the CSIS-2 safe house belonging to Edwin Brown, while Swift slept in the bedroom with the door open. Finally, Hinkston’s voice came on, sarcastic and angry. “Mr. Quarrel, so nice of you to think of me. I hear you killed a bunch of men in my back yard this morning.”

“I don’t know what you mean, but if a bunch of people were dead, would you be able to tell me who they were working for?”

“The guys you killed were Americans, actually. And don’t play games with me when you shoot up an apartment down the highway from Langley.”

“What?” Quarrel shouted, his voice a little too loud. Swift stirred in the bedroom. She walked into the kitchen, stretching and yawning. She opened up Mr. Brown’s fridge. It was mostly empty, but there were a few unopened bottles of Gatorade, so she took one. She sat on the counter and sipped it, her eyes alert as she watched Quarrel cautiously.

Hinkston continued, and seemed to delight in layout the dangers that Quarrel faced. “They were Americans. Born here, trained here. Former Marines who went pro about six years back. We’ve seen their work before, mostly in South America. These are the guys the drug cartels use when their own soldiers can’t get it done. Honestly, I’m surprised you got out alive. These guys don’t mess around.”

“They shot the other guy first. Gave me a chance to hide.”

“Of course they did. After all, someone was impersonating Agent Smith. But you knew that, didn’t you, Mr. Quarrel?”

Quarrel wondered if Hinkston could identify Matthew Crowe but chose to ignore that for now. “And who did they work for?”

“Anyone who pays the bills.”

“So I still can’t tell who to trust in this mess.”

“Never trust, Mr. Quarrel. Only use people as long as you need them. And I hear you want to use my witness.”

“My witness,” Quarrel corrected, “she had some documents, they were some kind of blueprints or schematics. Per your request, I didn’t make a copy for myself and now I need them back. I’ve got evidence of something big and I need to piece it together.”

Hinkston’s end of the conversation went totally silent, and Quarrel knew he’d been placed on hold. Hinkston was talking to someone else and didn’t want Quarrel to hear. Swift knew it too and interjected.

“Who the hell are you talking to?” Quarrel waved her off as Hinkston came back on the line. “Sorry, Mr. Q, but the information on those pages was very sensitive. We’re not in the business of handing out state secrets.”

“Tell me about the array, Mr. Hinkston.”

“Array?”

“That’s what’s on those plans, isn’t it? Some kind of high-tech machine you guys cooked up. Funny how GX had that data on their server and how an international terrorist group is sending coded messages about it.”

“Which group is that?”

“I’m not in the business of giving away my information for free, Mr. Hinkston. By the way, did you know GX is run by a KGB assassin?”

Hinkston blustered that he was “tired of games,” but then the line went silent. Someone else had pushed the hold button and cut off Hinkston in mid-sentence. There was another silent wait where Quarrel could practically feel Swift’s eyes poking him. Hinkston returned, sounding deflated. “OK, Quarrel, you have a deal. I’ll show you mine if you show me yours. We’ll meet tonight. You’re calling from D.C. so how about we give you a nice tourist destination. Library of Congress, twenty-hundred hours. Got it?”

“Got it. And Mr. Hinkston?”

“Yes?”

“Do you have a first name?”

Hinkston hung up.

Quarrel had instructed Swift to use whatever resources she had available to plan a trip back to Zurich. She swore she could arrange passports, and other IDs, good enough to get them through an airport without Harry Milton or CIB knowing about it. While she went out to manage that, Quarrel came to the Library to see what Hinkston had to share.

His pocket vibrated. Quarrel had ditched the cell phone he usually carried; the one whose number he had given out to Milton and everyone involved in the investigation. But he had kept the second phone, the one only Thorpe knew about. It was a relief to finally hear from Thorpe, although it was worrying that he had been alone with Fatale for so long.

It was a text
:
I have photos of the traitor. Will deliver to you. Where?

Quarrel typed back
:
What happened with Fatale?

Thorpe
:
I will explain it all tonight. On my way to see Milton right now. Meet tonight?

Quarrel wondered if he could trust Thorpe, but remembered Hinkston’sadvice
.
OK. Meet me at Library of Congress, 1 hour.

Quarrel deleted the messages.

A man in a navy blue suit approached Quarrel. “Mr. Quarrel? Director Hinkston is waiting. I’ll take that cell phone.”

Quarrel didn’t bother to ask Navy Blue’s name. He was one of the CIA-types who wouldn’t even bother to use an alias. He would just smirk and not respond, as if his name was an unpronounceable look of contempt. It was no wonder that Milton had trusted an impossible-to-read robot like Smith, considering how common such men were in various roles within the intelligence world. Guys who had maybe been military, or perhaps trained somewhere off-the-grid, who believed that showing an emotion—any emotion—would betray state secrets. Quarrel had once believed that Hershey would eventually become one of these drones, but the person who drove a fertilizer bomb into CSIS-2 had guaranteed that Hershey’s career ended as a functionary in lower-middle-management.

Go
d
, Quarrel thought
,
I actually miss that brown-nosing asshole.

Quarrel allowed the navy blue spook to lead him down a hallway and into a private reading room where Hinkston’s hulking figure waited, leaning over a small chestnut table. Quarrel was still impressed by the American’s imposing size. For someone who seemed like a desk job type, Hinkston sure was huge. Once Quarrel was inside the room, Navy Blue nodded to his superior and left the room, closing and locking the door behind him. No doubt he would also block the wooden door with his impressive frame while Quarrel saw what he came to see.

“Where’s my information?” Hinkston demanded without so much as a greeting.

Quarrel untucked his shirt and pulled the folder out of the back of his pants, where it had been resting against his back.

“How clever, Mr. Quarrel. If someone decided to chase you, you could have had my government’s secrets falling out of your ass.”

“The group is called Digamma. Archaic letter F. As in archaic number six. As in six people who once had a purpose, but now exist with no defined meaning or allegiance. There were six members in the early nineties, founded after the USSR fell. Two Americans, Two Ruskies, a Brit and a private interest. The group’s founder, also called Digamma, was Martin Mercier.”

“Who?”

“Exactly. He was an assassin. Ended up mostly aligned with KGB. This group got together to erase him from your files so he could slip away anonymously. The only people who even had his prints on file were the Brits.”

Hinkston grabbed the folder from Quarrel with one of his massive gorilla hands and flipped through it so fast it was hard to believe he was reading anything. “Where did you get these? Most names are redacted. Not much information to be found in black sharpie marks.”

“I got them from a dead American. Matt Crowe. He didn’t die after all. Well, he’s dea
d
no
w
. . . ”

“In that parking garage.” Hinkston paused, thinking of the right words to use in front of an unknown like Quarrel. “He was disguised as Smith. So Smith was the mole then?”

“Smith was the tip of the iceberg. Crowe was the one who finger-painted that symbol on the wall and he was the one who mailed it to my office in Ottawa, too. Trying to start an investigation outside of England or the US. Hoping to shine a light on Mercier before any of the moles could stop him.”

Hinkston closed the file, exhaled hard. He squinted at Quarrel, as if scanning him, sizing him up. “CIB’s purview was specifically related to finding Crowe’s killer. If he wasn’t murdered in London, you have no right to see anything from me.”

Quarrel didn’t speak louder, but his voice took a harsher edge. “CIB’s job was to find a mole. I haven’t, yet. And I’m pretty damn sure that I got Senator Anderson killed when I kicked this thing into motion, so shut up and show me the array.”

Hinkston looked at the screen on his phone and Quarrel wondered if it was possible a third party was listening in, guiding Hinkston’s actions. After a moment’s grumbling, Hinkston unrolled a blueprint on the large table. This was the same thing Quarrel had seen from Maggie, but while she only had letter-sized photocopies of sections of it, this blueprint had everything.

“So what the hell is it and what does Digamma want with it?”

“It’s not so much an ‘array’ as a single unit. A number of emitters linked together, in order to multiply their effect.”

“Emitters?”

“Microwaves. In the eighties there was a project to try and control the weather with a targeted microwave beam.”

Quarrel knew that, but not from his spy experience. He had seen a special on TV about it: “HAARP. In Alaska. So this is it?”

“No. HAARP was fairly public. I mean, it is basically an acre full of big metal things pointed at the sky; pretty hard to hide. People know where it is, and we’ve barely even lied about what it was built for. To be blunt, it doesn’t work and never has. The idea was that if you could heat water in the atmosphere in very specific locations, you could bounce the molecules together and make it rain. Cure drought. Or if an area was flooding you could make it rain somewhere nearby, spread the water over a large area to avoid flood damage.”

“But it doesn’t work?”

Hinkston shrugged. “Before my time. But as far as anyone at the CIA will tell me, this thing was a huge waste of money. DOD and DARPA took a run at weaponizing it, but the damn thing’s in Alaska. Even if it did work, you’d only be able to hit the U.S., Canada, and the emptiest parts of Russia, and flooding Canada’s not really in our mandate. Moot point anyway, since it doesn’t do jack shit.”

Quarrel tapped the paper. “But this blueprint isn’t HAARP? This is something else?”

“Like I said, it’s a very large grouping of microwave emitters. HAARP times ten. And built to be angled, targeted toward where we needed it. They call it TCPE. Targeted Charged Particle Emitter.” Hinkston pronounced the acronym as “teacup”. “I honestly don’t know what kind of radiation or particles or whatever this thing was supposed to shoot out, but it all falls into the category of ‘microwaves’ as far as I know.”

“And this thing was actually built? In the eighties?”

“Yeah. DARPA was stubborn about HAARP, so they built a bigger one. I guess they had something to prove.”

Quarrel snapped his fingers, realization dawning. “ . . . And if this thing was built expressly as a weapon, not just a scientific experiment, I’m betting that there were some safeguards in place, weren’t there?”

Hinkston shrugged. “I’d assume so. But again, it’s before my time.”

“And if you were going to build a big-ass weapon in the eighties, you’d use the best safeguards you had. Nuclear safeguards. Nuclear bomb control computers.”

“The shipment that got hijacked!” Hinkston said, eyes widening. “They didn’t go for the fissionable materials. They didn’t try to steal a nuke.”

Quarrel nodded. “They only went for the computers.”

“Because with one of those things, you could turn Teacup back on.”

Hinkston pulled out his phone. “I’m putting a satellite over that place, right now. And I’m calling in a team. I want to lock this thing down. I want to own it.