The Hidden Vector: A Spy Thriller

by Mathew Snyder

  “Fair point. That’s why we think there may be three active cells. Pierce believes Hessler acted as a matter of opportunity. She wouldn’t have been there to pull that trigger if not for him. His assumption is that she was working to undermine him, not to eliminate the asset. He was pretty clear about that. He recruited her to help, not the other way around. Which means this network had other plans for the asset. I think that’s a fair assumption. Think of her move as a precaution.”

  “A precaution.” Drummond leaned back slightly and exhaled. He seemed partly satisfied with the answer.

  Harley Gilchrist, sitting heavy in his chair, appeared far less convinced.

  “So, you think she was protecting something else. Is that about the right of it?” Harley asked.

  “She wasn’t protecting herself. She blew her cover. Now she’s on the run from us and GIS. Not a good career move.”

  Harley turned his head. “What do you think, Alan? What’s she protecting?”

  Alan stared at the tabletop and shook his head slowly. “It has to be the Russians. Who else could have done this to us? SVR must have turned her without us knowing,” he said.

  “So, you don’t agree with Paul’s theory about some new non-state actor?”

  Alan looked askance at Paul to his left. “I think it sounds a little far-fetched. Nothing the Russians do surprises me anymore.”

  “Supposing it was the Russians,” Harley said. “What’s their goal? They get a pack of their least favorite Chechens to blow up a Georgian airliner. They burn an agent to help cover up their involvement. It would have to be something mighty important to them.”

  “Intimidation, maybe? Paving the way for more action in South Ossetia? Take your pick.” Alan waved his arms as his frustration rose again.

  “I don’t buy it,” Harley said. He gripped the edge of the table and scowled at Alan. His Southern charm disappeared, and Alan sunk slightly in his chair.

  Drummond leaned in. His voice came level and cool. “After all this, we are coming up short. I don’t want to keep saying this, people. Get me answers. You are wasting time.”

  Paul stood from his chair, and everyone but Harley stood with him. They eyed one another with stunned looks. Drummond ignored them and moved to his desk. He was done with them. Time to go.

  “Not you, Paul,” Harley said. He sucked at his teeth patiently, his hands still gripping the table’s edge.

  Paul nodded to the rest as they left the room. Suzanne shot him a stabbing look. She would have more to say sooner than later. He sat back in his chair wondering what mode of displeasure he faced. But Drummond seemed disinterested as he checked his phone and began dialing. Harley looked at him for several seconds as if locked in thought.

  “What have you figured out about this Scorpio thing?” Harley asked.

  So that was it. Harley waited out his surprised expression. Remind me never play poker with him, he thought.

  “Not much, I’m afraid. We weren’t sure what to make of it at first. Maybe a code name or some nom de guerre. Pierce tried it out on Seda Alaskhanova. It’s on the interrogation tape the Georgians provided. She loses control when he mentions it. His best guess is that’s the mystery man from the hijacking.”

  Harley opened a folder at his side and twirled a sheet of paper toward Paul. Paul grabbed his reading glasses from his breast pocket and examined the sheet.

  “What is this?” he said while he skimmed the document. It listed dates and operations trailing back two years.

  Harley pointed his thick finger at the paper. “That,” he said, “is the Scorpio Compact. More accurately, a record of the times it’s mentioned in reports for the last couple years.”

  “But my team’s been searching those reports. We were looking for this.”

  “Yes, I know that as sure as I’m sitting here. I had it collected. Then I had it blocked.”

  “You can do that?” he asked. He didn’t like the idea of anyone looking over his shoulder without him realizing. Maybe it was worse now that he knew.

  Harley grinned. “Pretty cool, ain’t it?”

  The list contained excerpts of reports from collected intelligence. He recognized two of the operational reports, including Pierce’s report at the bottom. But at least a dozen more were unfamiliar. The reports spanned the globe. Indonesia, Argentina, three in Australia, Tunisia. One caught his eye—Romania. The excerpts mentioned Scorpio mostly in oblique terms, others more directly. Two noted something called the Scorpio Compact. He needed to read more of the reports themselves. The context escaped him. From what he could piece together, the references pointed not to a person, but a group. This was the network, he realized. The non-state actor they’d pegged as the new enemy. They were active and responsible for the deaths of 183 souls on AC 163. They killed Marcus Eldridge. Christ, they turned Hessler.

  Harley let him read in quiet for a moment while Drummond hunched over his desk muttering into his cell phone.

  “Where’s the rest of this?” Paul asked.

  “You’ll get it,” Harley said.

  “Who else knows?”

  “Besides the senior analyst who pulled this together for me, you’re looking at them.” Harley wagged his head at Drummond who looked up from his phone for a moment. Drummond was listening more carefully than he thought.

  “Suzanne’s not going to like this,” he said. As soon as he said it, he realized Harley’s ploy. She would think he was getting drawn down for what happened in Georgia and taking his turn at the whipping post.

  Harley shrugged. He didn’t care so much about appearances, which was not to say he hated the politics. He’d never be director because of it. Not that it mattered. Drummond needed him, and so would the next director in line. Harley’s casual shrug said enough. It meant Paul would have to handle Suzanne himself along with anyone else who pried.

  Paul removed his glasses and scratched his temple. “What do you need me to do?”

  “For a start, keep Pierce on this one like a duck on a June bug. Work it unilaterally. No involvement from the Romanians or anyone else. But there’s a bigger problem. It’s a very real possibility this Scorpio outfit has someone inside.”

  “You mean someone else in the Agency?”

  “I mean someone else here at Langley,” Harley said.

  Paul let the observation sink in, as hard as it was to believe. Penetration was always a risk, but for him an abstraction like some relic of the Cold War. A bogey man from his earliest time at the Agency when the veterans talked about the bad old days. He continued his work and let Counter Intelligence do theirs. His mind rewound the faces he’d seen during the week. The analysts and officers, the supervisors. Losing Maria Hessler out in the field was one thing. Someone here at Langley was another. He felt a rush of warmth to his head at the realization, and he felt a little foolish for it.

  Harley watched him absorb the implications and a smirk emerged. Behind him, Drummond finished his call and put the phone in his coat pocket.

  He looked up at Harley. “How do you know it isn’t me?”

  Harley’s smirk grew and he let out a bark of a laugh. “Let’s just say you don’t fit the profile. You and Pierce really stepped in it, didn’t you?”

  “And what about him? You’ve got more reason to suspect Pierce than anybody after his contact with Maria Hessler.”

  “Maybe you’re right. You worried about Pierce yourself?” Harley said.

  Paul’s eyes shot from Harley to Drummond and back again.

  “No, I am not.”

  “Good.”

  Harley reached across the table and slid the Scorpio summary back to his side. He tucked it into his folder and stood up. Paul stood with him and put his glasses back in his breast pocket. They shook hands. Harley’s massive hand engulfed his. Drummond rose and joined them near the door.

  “Hessler changed everything, Paul,” Drummond said. “This Scorpio group was Harley’s hobby. I didn’t put any stock into it myself with everything else we’re up ag
ainst. This one snuck up on us. I don’t like that one bit. But now it’s real, and we’ve got to get ahead of it. This is your top priority.”

  “I’m already there, sir.”

  “Then do more,” he said.

  Paul spent the next four hours reading and re-reading Harley’s collected reports on Scorpio. The patchwork of threats bore little connection to one another. They shared connections in the deep web, though he needed Kay’s help with the technical details. It was an underground internet where participants could share data anonymously via encrypted relays. An internet outside of the internet. For Scorpio, it seemed to be a virtual recruiting ground for malcontents and radicals.

  One report involved Argentine nationals who bribed agribusiness executives to prevent release of a food preservative for produce. MI-6 discovered the cell had retained the molecular details and posted them on part of the deep web.

  That same site later posted a bounty for hacking ECDIS, the electronic navigation system for ships. A trio of Filipino brothers earned the bounty after one of them inserted a flash drive into the system on a Malaysian container ship called the Danum 172. The virus they inserted did little harm outside of bragging on the ship’s consoles until the crew reset systems. The brothers took the money and disappeared until one of them showed up dead two months later in Macau. His ears and eyelids had been cut away. So had his fingers.

  The latest, and it turned out longest, plot caught his interest most. Several members of Ansar al-Sharia in Tunisia worked for months to earn jobs at a phosphate mining operation. Their goal was gathering enough uranium from the mine’s waste stacks to build a dirty bomb. It might even have worked had they more patience and resources. His experience was that fanatics had too little of either.

  It wasn’t the dirty bomb attempt that caught his attention, though. It was their handler. An Agency asset in Tunis provided intel on the interrogations that followed. At least four of those interrogated admitted working for ‘Skorpios.’ They described him as a European bomb maker. The details weren’t as important to him as the method. The outsider infiltrated a group of Islamist fanatics and built them into a network and operation. Whatever their aim, whatever their purpose, they were deliberate in their method. He saw the fingerprints of tradecraft here—the familiar signs of intelligence building. Each cell had a handler. Each handler, he guessed, a director. If there was a foreign agency building these networks, he couldn’t see it. This was a new kind of enemy for the new century.

  Each operation alone was a minor real threat. Together, they suggested greater ambitions. He knew nothing about what they wanted or why. Worse, if they built assets as he suspected, then they were resilient. Harley was right to suspect. How much had they already overlooked?

  Harley’s collected intelligence didn’t connect to Georgia. It held no hint even of Chechnya. But the tradecraft was the same. The Chechens weren’t the instigators. They were the assets. The sixth man was their handler. And somewhere out there was a director, a mirror image of himself in an organization he knew nothing about.

  He left headquarters knowing that on his return tomorrow, everything would change. Everything already had. He nodded at the tall officer at the security desk. He thought his name was Roger, and Paul couldn’t count the late nights when Roger had given him a half smile and a nod as he walked out tired and distracted. Over thirteen years he’d observed Roger growing older with him, his black face and beard turning grayer by the seasons. He couldn’t recall a real conversation in those years leaving under Roger’s late watch. Tonight he no longer saw Roger as blameless—one of his fellow teammates united in common cause. Tomorrow, he would see everyone else, those familiar and strange, as potential betrayers.

  They needed to gain lost ground. He’d moved Pierce to Romania, but the man needed rest. They couldn’t afford any more lost time, so there would be no rest for any of them.

  He drove home with the sunset’s glare blazing on his windshield. Light peeked through the trees and wooden fences along Dolly Madison Boulevard as he followed his usual route. He often worked late. He could avoid the rush near I-495 and ease into Vienna without shouting himself hoarse at drivers. It wasn’t a long commute. He and Janey were lucky to find a home they could barely afford thirteen years ago. Things were better now. Being this close had been worth it. Janey had friends. The boys thought of it as home.

  Old instincts filled his head. Tomorrow he needed to change his route home. He checked his rear-view mirror and wondered what he hoped to find there. He wasn’t the paranoid type. What he needed was time to think and plan. Still alert, he pulled on to his street where the maples hung over the road touching branches. He and Janey preferred the older neighborhood. If not exactly quiet, it was a refuge with less traffic and pleasant shade. There was a car near his driveway. Not unusual, really. On a normal day, he wouldn’t have bothered to notice it. Someone was inside. A woman wore large sunglasses, though twilit shadows cloaked more details inside her car.

  He pulled into the driveway without raising the garage door. Standing in the driveway gave him an excuse to survey the street and the car. Dining room lights at the Bauman’s glowed across the street. He glanced at the car, a featureless silver coupe at the edge of the street. The woman opened her door and waited at the corner of his driveway.

  He stood with his jacket folded over his left harm. He put his hands on his hips and squinted at the woman. She seemed familiar.

  “Mr. Corso?”

  It was Sarah Pierce, Ethan’s ex-wife. Since he last saw her, she had cut her long brown hair into a neat bob that framed her pointed chin. The sunglasses obscured her eyes and face, but it was her. She was still dressed for work. Last he knew, she had risen up the ranks as a lobbyist for some pharmaceutical firm. From the creases in her skirt, he guessed she’d been waiting for him for at least a couple hours.

  “I’m sorry to bother you like this. I know I shouldn’t. I just …”

  “Sarah?” he said, almost to himself. He glanced down the street, then scolded himself for the paranoia.

  “I’m sorry. It’s just that I’ve been trying to get hold of Ethan.”

  “That’s not something I can help you with.”

  He approached her in the street and stood at the end of the drive where the concrete had buckled and cracked over the years. She had been a guest at his house once. A Christmas party he and Janey threw a few years ago. He had invited a few from the office, mostly people new to the city who didn’t have many connections yet. Today of all days, she shouldn’t be here.

  “I know. But I’m really worried about him. I mean, I know how this works. He’s gone for a while, I get that.” She shook her head. “God, do I get that. It’s just I need to tell him something. And I need to know he’s okay.”

  “Sarah, you know there’s nothing I can tell you.”

  She held her breath and waited.

  “Is he alive?”

  “I can’t say anything to you. I would if I could. I’m sorry.”

  “I left him a message. Sometimes when we were still together, I’d leave him a message, and he’d leave me one back. He kept doing it when we divorced, but he hasn’t left a message in a while. I watch the news, and I know that’s where he’s involved. I just know it.”

  Paul sighed and shook his head. Yesterday, he might have let that slide. Today, Pierce leaving messages for his ex was a severe risk. He’d have to deal with it later, but Sarah wasn’t to blame. She took off the sunglasses and dabbed at her left eye.

  “I need to tell him something,” she said. “I need him to be okay, and I need to tell him I’m getting married. The wedding’s in less than three weeks.”

  What could he say? Most Agency divorces he knew weren’t quite this endearing. It was low on the list of things he wanted Pierce to be distracted by right now.

  “Congratulations,” he said. He meant it, but it came out wrong. He wanted to tell her that the concern in her face betrayed her uncertainty about her future. But there wa
s no use telling her that. Behind him, the front door opened. He saw Janey’s silhouette in the illuminated doorway.

  “Paul, honey, who is it?”

  He turned and waved.

  “Janey, you remember Sarah Pierce. She’s just dropping off a message for me.”

  Janey’s silhouette raised a hand to wave. He thanked her silently for staying in the doorway and turned back to Sarah.

  “How does she do it?” Sarah said.

  “To tell you the truth, I have no idea. Go home.”

  He patted her shoulder. It was a feeble thing to do. He wasn’t her father. She got in the car and waved. Her eyes pleaded once more, and she drove away.

  Chapter 10: No Coincidences

  Constanța, Romania

  3:41 p.m., Sunday, June 2

  Ethan sat at a cafe awaiting his only lead. The chair across from him remained empty, and he scanned the tourists ambling by the seaside for any sign of Nicu Prodan, the customs official he’d groomed for two weeks since arriving in Constanța.

  The outdoor cafe spilled onto the concrete seaside. He had a pleasant view of the Casino, a magnificent edifice that had fallen into disrepair. Arches within arches flowed languorously into a grand edifice whose function had shifted over the tumultuous century. He admired its beauty and its emptiness, but its purpose was lost to him. He gazed eastward across the gray water toward Georgia where he had let two people die—where his reckless operation had disintegrated in an instant. Where Maria betrayed him.

  He fit in among the tourists in his faded jeans and black collared shirt that fell too loosely around his torso. Five days imprisoned with the Georgians had a surprising effect on his health. His skin had paled, but his eyes had darkened from lack of sleep. He didn’t eat much of their terrible food, but he couldn’t blame the Georgians for his brief imprisonment. It took five days and, he guessed, pressure from Director Drummond to convince them they faced a new enemy called Scorpio, and that he was no part of it. Maria and this Scorpio group had betrayed him as well. For all his influence, Corso couldn’t have persuaded GIS by himself.