by S L Shelton
Silence.
“That’s better,” I said.
“We have to hurry,” he said with worry in his expression. “I had to cut you off from your autonomic functions to have this conversation.”
I stopped mid-grab for my mug. “What? Like breathing and such?”
He nodded. “Like breathing and such.”
I started to panic. I had grown used to his presence in my head over the past few months, but I wasn’t so comfortable with him that I trusted him shutting down my heart and breathing so we could have a chat.
“Relax,” he said. “This conversation is taking place in less than half a second. Your heart and breathing will miss a single beat.”
“Then let’s get this over with,” I said. “What’s going on with m—”
“The voices in your head aren’t personalities—they are memories,” he replied before I could ask my question. Sometimes I forgot he knew what was in my head before I did.
“Then why are they popping up in my ears?”
“I’ve been trying to hold things together, but your brain is rerouting around the scarred neurotransmitters,” he said. “It’s normal brain behavior after a trauma. But it’s affecting you unfavorably because of the enhancements.”
“I thought you had control over my brain functions,” I snapped. “You said you rewrote my whole neural matrix after the knockout drug fried my brain when I was ten.”
“It took me more than five years to fully work around that damage,” he said, after pausing to take a sip of coffee from a mug identical to the one in front of me—a mug that I knew to be unique. “And I’m more limited now than I was then.”
“You can stop my heart,” I said, snide.
“Even if all your analytical tools were in place, I couldn’t convey to you the complexity of the relationship I have with you and your brain. I am you. Stop acting like I’m some foreign entity that wishes you harm.”
There was bitterness in his tone I hadn’t heard before. But I recognized the emotion markers as being my own.
I nodded. “What can I do?”
“Nothing,” he replied. “I’ll continue to try and minimize the sensory leakage from the healing process. But you have to do more to compensate for the loss of your tools. You are making dangerous mistakes.”
“Like what?”
“Well, first, you are lying in the bed of a Mossad agent and having conversations with Langley while she wraps her arms around you.”
“You told me to trust her back in Amsterdam, not even ten months ago,” I snapped.
“That was situational,” Wolf said. “Not a blanket endorsement of her character or motivations. In a matter of minutes, you went from trusting Nick with your life to doubting his reliability.”
“Only because of—”
“I know. We don’t trust Penny Rhodes,” he said. “But my point is that trust is transient…not permanent. Just because you can rely on someone for one thing doesn’t mean you can trust them in all things.”
That had me worried. I had based most of the trust I’d given to Kathrin on what Wolf had said in May last year.
“And the fact that you are in love with her,” he inserted, reading my thoughts again.
“In love?” I asked incredulously. “Don’t be ridiculous.”
He smiled, patronizing. “Puhlease… You forget who I am.”
Damn! I thought. Why am I cursed with such a vocal internal fact checker? He was right of course.
He just shook his head.
“So I shouldn’t trust her?” I asked.
“I didn’t say that,” Wolf replied. “But you can’t rely on automatic awareness anymore. You’ll have to do the work, just like everyone else.”
“With voices in my head.”
“Like everyone else, plus voices in your head…yes.”
“Thanks,” I muttered.
“My pleasure,” he replied mockingly. “You need to get out of Kathrin’s apartment, regardless.”
“I know,” I said, cradling my mug.
“We can’t rely on Adina to keep her silence indefinitely,” he added.
“I know!” I repeated, loudly.
He nodded. “I think Storc is trying to contact you.”
“What?” I asked.
I woke, sitting up sharply in bed, taking a panicked breath. My heart was beating rapidly.
Kathrin propped up on her elbow and put her hand on my chest. “Are you okay?”
I nodded as I grabbed my phone. It showed a new secure text from Storc. I activated my secure proxies and dialed his secure line as I glanced at the time at the top of my phone. It was nearly six in the morning my time.
“Hello,” I heard Storc’s voice squawk on the other end.
“Hey, man. Tell me you have something on the company that hired the couriers,” I said.
“I do,” he replied. “I’m still working on an address. But a margin note on a scanned document from BKBV Privatbank Zurich AG said ARG Banti is the originating corporation. The chief executive is R. Loeff.”
“Do you have anything on a location?” I asked.
“Yeah, sort of,” he said. “There was a sticky note on one of the cover documents when it was scanned. It said, ‘Hand carry copy of contract’…in German. I had to translate.”
“So Banti must be in Zurich or at least in the neighborhood,” I said.
“Yeah.”
“Cool. Switzerland. That’s enough to start with—Hey! What’s this I hear about an inspection and an upgrade?” I asked.
“We were pretty pissed, but the CIA liaison office called and told us to expect it. They sent some jackshit vendor out who didn’t even recognize most of what we had done. I cloned everything off as a backup in case we needed to roll it all back.” The annoyance was clear in his voice.
“Jo seemed to think it might affect our proprietary stuff,” I said.
“I don’t think so. The app server is isolated on a partitioned drive. The IPs are categorized as internal only. I can’t think of a single reason they would be affected by external security,” he replied.
“Are you in front of a computer?” I asked.
“Of course,” he replied.
I didn’t know why I had even bothered asking.
“Check something for me,” I said. “Look and see if there were any partitions created by the upgrade.”
“I already know there are. It was one of the first things I checked after he left,” Storc replied. “But they are heavily encrypted. I could probably break it, but not in a way that would go unnoticed.”
“You don’t have to break it. I’m going to send a data packet through the secure data app. Monitor the partitions and the outgoing IPs, and see if there’s a change,” I said.
“Okay. Ready,” he replied
I sent the data packet. It was an excerpt from the collected works of William Shakespeare. A second passed, and then, “Oh shit,” Storc said. “It used our own system to decrypt it, then it re-encrypted and routed it out.”
“That’s what I was afraid of,” I replied quietly. “Okay. This is a problem. We need to stop using the company servers for anything other than official, invoiced Agency work. Everything else has to go through another source.”
“This call is on my personal server cluster and piggybacked through about a hundred proxies. The encryption and the routing change every two seconds,” he replied. “Will that work for now?”
“Yes. Until we can get alternative systems running or get ours cleaned up. I’ve just given Jo a project. Off the books. Let her know as soon as I hang up that she can’t use office resources for it.”
“What kind of project?” he asked.
“Backup,” I replied. “She’ll need your help setting up a data vault that she can release if something happens to me.”
He didn’t respond.
“It’s just insurance,” I added.
“Okay,” he said quietly. “Scott. Are you in the shit again?”
“Looks like it,” I replied, pulling no punches. “And we can’t trust the Agency.”
“Even Nick?” he asked.
I took a deep breath. “Nick is solid…but I think his objectivity may be compromised.”
“Does this have anything to do with Rhodes?”
“Without getting into any detail, yes,” I replied grimly. “It does.”
“I’ll keep a lid on everything until you say otherwise.”
“Thanks, pal,” I replied. “Keep everyone locked down tight until this is resolved. It would kill me if anything happened to any of you guys.”
“You got it, boss. Stay safe,” he said.
“Will do. You do the same.”
“See ya,” he replied and ended the call.
Bad news and more bad news. My resources had been compromised. Not in itself terrible. It was probably just normal CIA, cloak and dagger, cover-your-ass paranoia that had prompted the system changes. But if not, my position, or at the very least, the city I was in, had been revealed.
I needed to leave Kathrin. I had lingered here with her for too many days while the people I was supposed to be hunting could be closing in on my technology. There was no way I could ask her to leave her post, and there was no way I could justify staying in one place for a moment longer.
But as she lay against me, her head tucked into the crook of my arm, I couldn’t bring myself to wake her again. My resolve melted away, and I let her sleep.
The ill ease of the revelations nagged at me until finally, carefully, I extracted my arm from under Kathrin’s head. I rolled out of bed around seven o’clock and walked barefoot across the cold hardwood floors to the living room. The early morning sun colored the windows with pale light as I looked out onto the street. Nothing out of the ordinary. Just a few early morning walkers, not uncommon for a Sunday morning. There was little or no traffic.
I left the window and sat on the sofa before pulling up logged dispatches from local authorities on my iPhone, indulging my paranoia. I immediately saw something disturbing. Overnight there had been a small explosion at the airport that had caused a fire in one of the hangars. One body had been found after the fire brigade had extinguished the flames. They didn’t state which hangar it was, but the nagging tick, tick, tick in the back of my mind indicated I shouldn’t wait to find out.
The second item cemented my concern. Earlier that morning, a call had been made to police about a car going off the road into the river. The location of the accident was a mere four blocks away. The flash of panic that news caused within me made me flip over to the GPS tracking on Bellos’s phone.
I waited impatiently, my foot tapping as the map loaded. When a cluster of three blips appeared on the map only four blocks away, I suddenly felt it difficult to breathe…as if someone had punched me in the stomach.
“Kathrin!” I yelled as I jumped from the couch and ran to the bedroom. She was just hitting the floor as I entered the room.
“We have a problem,” I said as I handed her my phone to show her the news. “This is four blocks away,” I said and flipped to the story of the fire at the airport. “And I believe this is the hangar where the CIA dropped me off.”
She jumped to action, wasting no time grabbing her T-shirt from the floor and pulling it over her braless torso.
She ran to the closet and pulled an empty bag from the floor before looking up and calling out to the ceiling. “Adina. We need you. Now.”
The mics in the apartment were obviously still on because in the next few seconds we heard heavy footfalls coming down the stairs outside the apartment. A key turned in the door bolt and Adina rushed into the living room, barefoot, wearing only sweatpants and a T-shirt.
“Wir brauchen, um die externe Überwachung gestartet. We may be blown,” Kathrin said as she pulled her fatigue pants over her panties, telling Adina to fire up the surveillance systems.
She stuffed her feet into her boots, and we followed Adina back upstairs to the surveillance room. Upon entering, I saw a setup that would make Storc drool. Server racks, multiple monitor stations, satellite dishes sitting on boxes and pointing at various points in the sky. It was spy central.
Adina pulled up the monitors and began scanning them for anything unusual. She switched back and forth between cameras along the river; Jordaenskaai, the street that ran along the river; several cameras that observed the entrances to local shops; and five that viewed the area immediately around the building we occupied.
“I don’t see anything,” she said, still scanning. “What’s happened?”
Kathrin explained the burned hangar and the car going into the river to Adina in German as I shifted my attention from monitor to monitor, looking for activity. As soon as Adina was up to speed, she immediately switched to a camera view that had a partially obscured view of the taxi incident location. She rolled the DVR footage back several hours to the time the car went into the river. Illuminated by stationary headlights, we watched as the car rolled down a ramp into the water. Only the briefest glimpse of detail was visible from the bad angle of the camera.
“Can you zoom in on the side of the car when it passes through the light?” I asked.
Adina paused the video and zoomed in, running enhancement filters on the footage as the car took up more of the screen. As the logo came into focus, my fears were confirmed.
“DRM Taxi,” I muttered. “Shit.”
“You know this car?” Adina asked.
I nodded. “Advance it. Fast forward,” I said.
She clicked her mouse a few times then set the video in motion. It was less than thirty minutes after the crash before rescue vehicles showed up. We watched in fast forward as vehicle headlights moved up and down the street in the dark. In a matter of seconds, the hours melted away at warp speed before sunrise brightened the scene. With the light came the ability to identify the vehicles on the street.
A brown sedan, a moving van, an old pickup truck, more sedans, a delivery truck, more sedans. As the sky got brighter, there were more vehicles. A pickup, a van, a sedan, a lull in traffic, and another delivery truck.
“Stop it,” I said aloud. Adina stopped it and backed it up slowly.
“That delivery truck. I think it came up before. At least once. Roll it back,” I said.
She backed the recording to the previous delivery truck. Yep. Same truck.
“Isn’t today Sunday?” I asked.
“Let’s see if it pops up again,” Adina said and pushed the video forward again. Faster this time.
1, 2, 3, 4… In total it went past the camera on the street along the river twelve times. It took it approximately fifteen minutes each time. Always the same direction, always the same speed—moderately slow.
“He’s looking for something,” I said softly. I turned around and looked at the satellite dishes, antennae, and server racks erected in the room. “How much of this stuff is on?” I asked, suddenly wondering what he might be looking for.
“Both the communications up-links are running and most of the servers,” Adina replied. “The real hot stuff is shut down until we need it.”
“Turn off everything you don’t need,” I said. She looked at me incredulously as if I were insulting her by even suggesting I was permitted to command her.
“Do it!” Kathrin snapped and proceeded to go around the room, turning off non-essential hardware. Adina followed suit and started working at the other end of the room.
When they were done, Adina plopped back down into her chair, oozing attitude. “Now what?” she asked impatiently.
“Bring up the corner in front of the house,” I said. She complied.
“Now run it backward and see if he’s been down our street.”
She ran the recording backward until the van popped into view at the eight-minute mark.
“Great,” I said sarcastically. “We’re on his delivery route. What else is around here that can put off a lot of electronic noise?”
“There is a TV and radio station two b
locks over. They cook the air around here. And the river patrol has an antenna up next to the river. It’s not a big antenna, but it puts out a lot of juice when it’s in use. But for all we know, he’s just driving around hoping to see you. Or maybe he’s looking for an address,” Adina said.
“Do you have a map of the immediate area?” I asked.
Kathrin pulled a map from a tube beside the desk. She rolled it out on a table behind us.
“Okay. We need to figure out his route. Pull every viable video feed and roll it back fifteen minutes to see where his loop is taking him.”
Adina complied, and after a couple of minutes, we had a fairly good picture of his southern, western, and northern path.
“There he is,” Kathrin said, pointing at the playback from several minutes prior.
I marked the position and the time stamp on the map.
“And there,” Adina added as the source switched to a different camera.
“Any more feeds?” I asked, marking the last set of numbers.
Adina flipped through several more views before shaking her head.
“We have no way of knowing what his eastern path is based on video, but we can get a rough estimate based on travel time,” I said, marking a dotted red line on the map for the area we couldn’t see from the cameras. When I was done, I stood back and looked at the whole loop drawn in red. “Fifteen minutes from door to door,” I said.
“He could simply have a high pickup mic and be listening through the windows,” Adina said. “We might be letting him know we are here right now just by talking about him.”
I looked at the time stamp on the video monitors. “No. We still have five minutes.”
“What then?” Adina asked.
I stared blankly at the map for a moment when an idea came to me. “What piece of equipment here puts off the most signal?” I asked.
“That does,” Adina said, pointing at a satellite dish with a large transmitter mounted on it.
“Spin it around to face the street. When he comes by next time, flip it on for just a second then turn it back off,” I said.
She looked at me with distrust.
“If you flip it for a second, he won’t be able to get a fix. But if he responds, we’ll know he’s monitoring for signal as well as voice.”