Vigilante Investigator Series Box Set

by Eden Sharp

  ‘So why stick around?’

  ‘Because I don’t like losing. Because I figured there would be a way to make use of the situation. Live streaming maybe. Eyes on the spies.’

  All kinds of scenarios began flooding my brain as I made connections about what all this could mean.

  ‘You think he’s on to i9?’ I asked.

  ‘I think it’s a possibility.’

  Again, I felt like my thoughts had been stopped in their tracks. The sheer capability of the man left me momentarily struck dumb. I doubted that I’d been brought in coincidentally. It was more likely Charlie had been flagged higher up in the loop.

  ‘So, what’s his endgame? Just to have the best guy working for him?’

  ‘On the back of this killer app, his little firm’s about to merge with a much bigger company meaning he’ll make a few million in shares.

  ‘When’s all this due to happen?’

  ‘On the twenty-ninth. Three and a half weeks’ time.’

  His eyes held me in a haunted stare then he looked away. It seemed like he was trying to find the words for something. He turned back and looked at me straight.

  ‘What else have you been doing with your life? Did you marry?’ he asked.

  I felt a sudden nauseous heat explode from my core and radiate into my chest.

  I broke away from his gaze. ‘No. I told you. I never wanted to.’

  ‘That was a long time ago.’

  Funny how you could be apart from someone for so long and then feel like no time had passed at all. I stared at a generic picture of a sailing boat on the wall and tried to form a combination of random floating words in my head into a coherent sentence.

  ‘How about you?’ I asked. Not a great come back. I didn’t want it to be misconstrued that it might be important to me but at the same time I hoped he’d found someone who could make him happy.

  ‘I never bothered.’

  A little stab of guilt needled me. I let it go.

  ‘You seeing someone?’ he asked.

  He was being more direct than I wanted him to be. I could feel my whole body being drawn toward the door. I fought to control the discomfort I felt. How to answer? I thought about it and supposed I was.

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘Is it serious?’

  ‘It’s new.’

  I needed to change topic.

  ‘Loose ends. The camera feed of me at Hudson and the receptionist I spoke to.’

  Charlie nodded. ‘I’ll take care of the feed and the girl on the desk likes me. Plus, she’d get fired if anyone found out about the air-gap breach using the thumb drive.’

  Harding had to have a reason for involving me. His previous role as a general would have made it routine for him to plan a few moves ahead. I figured we had a little time before any immediate danger kicked in and knowledge was power.

  ‘I’m going to find out who and what’s behind all this. See where we stand. Give me twelve hours and I’ll let you know where we are.’

  ‘Be careful Angie,’ Charlie said.

  I smiled and tried to make it look convincing, but it felt like my world and everything in it was about to come to an end.

  9

  When I dialed Paul’s number I didn’t expect him to answer it himself, let alone after two rings.

  ‘I’m getting on the next flight out,’ I said.

  ‘Then I’ll see you later,’ he said.

  I got a cross-country flight from San Francisco to Miami with a two-and-a-half-hour layover before heading on to BWI. I had eleven hours in the air and lost another three and a half due to the coast-to-coast time change.

  Thursday May 4th

  Twenty-five miles north-east of DC, the driver, who had been sent to pick me up from the airport, turned off at the Maryland 295 South exit labeled NSA employees only. Escorted by security vehicles down a guard road past several concrete barriers and checkpoints we eventually reached a lot of what he revealed to be eighteen thousand car parking spaces, all of which surrounded a Kafkaesque death star of a main building. It was like arriving at a dystopian mall on a shopping trip to hell. The one-way black glass facade reflected back the encircling lot like it was fading from view by virtue of a recently activated cloaking device.

  The driver accompanied me to the entrance. The inside resembled a reasonably standard office building if you discounted the abnormally high number of locked doors and forgot about the guns, soldiers, and barbed wire outside. I was met by a clean-cut guy with a haircut reminiscent of a picture from a nineteen eighties barber shop whose uniform made him some kind of guard. His uniform signage had him down as a Security Protective Officer and he directed me to what he described as the Visitor Control Center and waited alongside. He didn’t wear a name badge and he must have been a perfect recruit because he was so bland I would have had trouble in describing him and making him sound unique.

  After having my picture taken and waiting for several phone calls to be made I was processed along a line of people who signed me in, removed my phone, checked me for prohibitive items such as USB devices and gave me a spiel of rules and regulations before handing me a temporary badge clipped to a beaded neck chain which I was told to wear at all times. I was escorted to what the guard described as an access control terminal where he entered an identification number into the keypad to let me through before following on close behind.

  ‘Uncleared personnel are escorted at all times when entering secure areas,’ he said. I was sure an automaton could have done the same job and saved some tax dollars.

  We were cleared through another security check and allowed access to a bank of elevators.

  On exiting at the fourth floor we passed staff carrying secured containers, presumably filled with documents of national importance, down a series of corridors locked with deadbolts where we had to pass through additional security checkpoints. Each area was designated by either a red or blue seal. Finally, I was shown inside an aide’s office. An assistant accompanied me through into the inner sanctum.

  Paul stood up when I walked in. The aide closed the door behind me.

  ‘You set me up,’ I said.

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  He pointed at a blue leather chair in front of his desk and sat down.

  I stayed where I was.

  ‘What’s the deal?’ I said.

  He eyes held mine at a level gaze. ‘I see you know about the hacking.’ In a continuing straight forward tone he said, ‘He either works for us or spends the rest of his life in prison.’

  I could feel the heat rising up my body reach my cheeks.

  ‘You pretended to care about me to get to him.’

  Paul shook his head. ‘That’s not true. The way I see it, you’re his friend, or were. Two degrees of separation. If you’d found out down the line that you’d had a chance to save him by making the offer and I hadn’t given it to you, maybe you would have been angrier than you are now.’

  ‘You need me to sell it to him,’ I said.

  He nodded. ‘Yes. He’s more likely to listen to you.’

  I tried to slow my breathing. Calm myself down. He didn’t know about me.

  ‘How’s it got to happen?’

  Paul slid some paperwork at me. ‘I’m going to need you to read and sign this and go through some clearance procedures. Afterward, apart from what you say to Lau, you won’t be able to talk about this with anyone. Do you understand?’

  I felt like I was standing in a principal’s office. ‘If I don’t do what you want are you going to put me in jail too?’

  ‘I think on reflection you’ll be glad you could help out an old friend,’ he said.

  I could feel myself shaking. ‘By that I take it you mean him and not you.’

  We both sat in silence while I read through endless sets of guidelines entitled Allegiance to the United States, Foreign Influence, Foreign Preference, Sexual Behavior, Personal Conduct, Financial Considerations, Alcohol Consumption, Drug Involvement, Criminal Conduct, Secu
rity Violations, Outside Activities, and Misuse of Information Technology Systems. In addition to these were documents detailing my role and obligations. I knew what I was committing myself to, but the alternative was an impasse with no way of moving forward. I signed forms in four different places and handed them back.

  ‘The FBI will be brought in initially. They’ll leave Lau out in the field to carry on as normal but technically they’ll be holding him in a state of investigative detention while they look at previous cybercrimes they suspect he might have been involved in. The FBI will handle everything, it’ll be their case. They’ll do the interviewing, find out what they need to know until the product ships at the end of the month so the man he works for, Tomas Guzek, isn’t alerted ahead of time. Then they’ll arrest Lau and he’ll be detained for trial. Except afterward we’ll disappear him out of the system and he will be working for us. This information is classified.’

  ‘So, there’s going to be an amount of jail time,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, but we’ll do our part to expedite things. It’ll be best if you stick around as encouragement until the software is delivered and he’s detained. As far as Guzek is concerned, your cover will be you’re an old flame that’s been rekindled. We’ll change your documentation to make sure your investigator’s license or anything else compromising isn’t exposed. You’ll sit in on the FBI interviews, as a government employee monitoring the situation, which you will report upon directly to me. You’ll be provided with a securely encrypted cell phone with which to do so which will be used for no other purpose. You’ll also ensure Lau’s final handover to the FBI.’

  ‘What happens to Guzek?’

  ‘Don’t worry about him. He’ll be taken care of. You make sure Lau stays on track.’

  He looked at me for a response, but I didn’t have anything I wanted to say. He dialed down the formality a little, allowed himself a fatherly smile.

  ‘Jeff and I chatted about you once. He told me what struck him when you two first met was you presented as very mature, that you were way beyond your years. He said he never knew anything about your home life or early childhood, but you were very focused, consistently striving both athletically and academically, that you didn’t like to be beaten. Jo said the same thing, that you were smart and fearless and always believed you would win. Sometimes that’s all you need. Self-belief and will. Being a general taught me many things but mainly that there are always losses, and sacrifices have to be made.’

  But this time he wasn’t giving a pep talk to troops and he could probably tell from the look on my face that I wasn’t fired up for a mission I didn’t sign up for. The smile and softness disappeared.

  ‘My assistant will give you directions to where you need to go to complete briefing procedures,’ he said, standing up. ‘You’re about to become an employee of the Department of Defense.’

  10

  The clone-like guard picked up escort duty as we traveled back through our previous route in reverse.

  ‘I’ll be accompanying you back to the exit where any personal items will be reissued to you. A car will be waiting outside to take you to the Friendship Annex,’ he said.

  I was driven to Linthicum and another NSA facility complex where I was escorted to a building named FANX III. I ended up in a room full of bureaucrats in a gray office that looked in need of serious refurbishment where I was handed a questionnaire around ten pages in length and a pen. I was told I had thirty minutes to fill it out.

  The initial questions were straightforward detailing the previous ten years of my existence but after these, I hit a wall.

  Describe the relationship to your mother.

  None.

  Describe the relationship to your father.

  None.

  Describe your parent’s relationship to each other.

  I never knew them.

  Have you ever had psychological counseling?

  Not that I can remember.

  Have you ever attempted suicide?

  Maybe…

  I was tempted to insert joke answers to see where that led but didn’t want the whole process to drag out any longer than necessary. I muddled my way through then hit another.

  Have you ever committed computer abuse?

  The term was unspecified, but I figured it covered hacking. I wrote “no” and wondered if they would insist on Charlie doing the same.

  Around a half hour later a guy who could have worked for U-Haul or the postal service asked me to accompany him to a desk to hand over the form and complete a fingerprint card which was notarized. He then took me to a computer lab filled with surprisingly old-looking machines.

  ‘You will now take a computerized psychological exam of around five hundred true-false questions which will take around two hours. A psychologist will review your answers and highlight anything that looks interesting. After this you will have a one-to-one interview with the psychologist to review the test results and also your handwritten portion. Do you have any questions?’

  I shook my head and began to feel the weight of crushing conformity.

  Afterward, in an ordinary but dreary office where the only living thing was a light-starved potted palm, the psychologist sat looking at me from across his desk and began lobbing personal questions across in a single, unvaried monotone.

  ‘What is your name?’

  ‘Angela McGlynn.’

  He glanced at me then scribbled something on a notepad. He began running through the exact same set of questions from the questionnaire I’d spent the last two hours completing but with different wording. The process of glancing and noting-taking continued on in the same vein.

  ‘How did you get along with your mother?’ he asked.

  ‘I didn’t,’ I said. ‘She was dead before I could talk.’

  ‘Strange that...’ he said.

  I waited but there was nothing more.

  ‘Have you taken part in any illegal downloading or copyright infringements?’

  ‘I downloaded music a few times in high school,’ I said.

  ‘Did you sell it?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Are you into bestiality?’

  ‘No.’

  He studied my reaction for a little longer than necessary then wrote something on his pad.

  ‘Are you into child pornography?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘But you like the idea of…’

  His reactions were hard to misinterpret. A cocked head, a look directly at me for an awkward amount of time, an answer that trailed off at the end. He was trying to unnerve me, provoke a reaction.

  I continued answering in the negative about group orgies, drug taking, and hearing voices in my head. Only one regarding fantasizing about extreme violence, made me pause.

  He placed a printout of the results of the computerized test in front of me. A graph had been created. Each of the questions mapped to neuroticism, extraversion, openness to experience, agreeableness, and conscientiousness.

  He circled some of the lines.

  ‘Based on the test results, you’re low to medium risk,’ he said.

  ‘You will now need to submit to a polygraph.’

  The polygrapher was maybe the same age as me, around his late twenties, and about three inches shorter making him five-six or so. He smiled more than the psych had and I smiled back though I didn’t much feel like it. He handed me more documentation to sign that said the polygraph was voluntary, I still retained my constitutional rights, and was not being held against my will.

  He explained the polygraph would measure my stress response to questioning and ran through the whole scenario of the procedure. At least he didn’t try and play it off that it actually detected lies. It was pseudo-science at best and could be beaten by force of will which was something I was going to be trying out. I doubted any of it mattered though. They needed me more than I needed them.

  I was hooked up by contact points to my head, arms and fingers and by a strap around my chest and the polygrap
her moved my chair to face the wall. He pumped up a pressure collar, warned me that the test was beginning and not to move.

  ‘I would like you to lie about the following questions,’ he said.

  ‘Is your name Angela McGlynn?’

  I bit my tongue hard. By elevating my stress response to a lie, I knew I could skew the test.

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘Do you live at The Randall, First Street, San Francisco, California?’

  As much as I had wanted to lie about this on the previous forms, Paul knew my address so it wasn’t an option. There was irony in the fact I was being asked to lie anyway. I bit my tongue before answering again.

  ‘No,’ I said.

  After asking me a few more basic questions, he deflated the collar, told me I could move, and wrote some things on my printout.

  We repeated this, three more times except I had to define what all the questions meant. Then he told me we were moving on to the important phase.

  ‘Are you engaged in espionage against the US?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Are you secretly involved with foreign nationals?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Have you engaged in acts of terrorism against the US?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Have you ever mishandled US-classified information?’

  ‘No.’

  I consciously began to daydream about a favorite beach in Thailand and calm down because sooner or later I was going to be forced to lie.

  ‘In the last seven years, have you used an illegal drug?’

  ‘No, I never have,’ I said.

  ‘Have you ever committed a serious crime?’

  I visualized freshly-caught fish cooking over a driftwood fire, white sand and the sound of the ocean.

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘Have you lied about anything on your security forms?’

  I imagined breathing in clean, fresh air.

  ‘No,’ I said.

  He carried on for an indeterminable time while the discomfort of sitting still and facing the wall worsened my mood. Just as I felt we might be nearing the end he started back over with the first questions and others centering on “terrorism”, “sabotage”, “secret”, “classified”, and “foreign nationals,” explaining and defining the meaning of every single one. When I felt we’d finally covered everything he’d asked me before, I started to feel elated that it was coming to an end. Then things turned ugly.